Read Relics Page 8

Marion awoke with a quick jolt. His head felt stiff and unwieldy, and a thick pool of saliva drooled from his open mouth onto the metal floor.

  The van was surprisingly warm, with bright sunshine and a soft breeze slipping through the half-open cargo doors. Marion rubbed his eyes, disoriented, his thoughts still buried in sleep. For a second he was troubled by the nagging thread of a nightmare, but the images were hazy and indistinct, and faded quickly beneath the glowing sunlight.

  Where are we? Marion squinted at his surroundings: rust-spotted walls, a dented gas can, a long metal case mounted over the rear doors. And there, in the middle of it all, lay Allison, still curled into a sleeping ball against the floor.

  “Allison?” Marion leaned forward and shook her by the shoulder, then nervously cupped one hand in front of her face. With relief, he felt the warm whisper of her breath against his palm. He sat there for a long while, staring at her sleeping face, trying to will her awake. It was amazing just how much he missed the emerald spark of her eyes, the slight turn of her smile. He had fallen out of the habit of caring about people, Marion realized. And now that he had someone to care about, his brain didn’t quite know how to cope with her absence.

  “Hey, look who’s up!” Vance’s voice drifted through the van doors, and Marion snapped his head around, finding the man he knew as Poppy waving in the distance. He swiftly gathered up his half-unrolled windbreaker and rearranged it tenderly beneath Allison’s tousled hair.

  “I’ll be right back,” he promised, lowering her head onto the faded blue fabric. Allison stirred, her lips forming small, silent words. Marion brushed a few strands of hair back from her face, wondering what she was dreaming. Finally, reluctantly, he scooted away and slid out of the back of the van, stretching his cramped legs, his eyes half-blinded by the midday sun.

  As he exited the van, Marion found that it was parked in the center of an immense raised platform, at least fifty meters square, fenced off with strung metal cables on all four sides. It looked like the world’s largest boxing ring, dropped down in the middle of an overgrown, scrub-covered field.

  Scanning the platform’s surface, Marion realized that it was some sort of junkyard — an enormous, secluded space filled with broken mediascreens, rusting appliances, heaps of scrap metal and scattered bales of crushed plastic. And at each distant corner, a single spindly support post rose into the sky.

  Four. Why are there four? Marion swung his gaze from one to the other, spinning in a complete circle, and then tilted his head back, following them as they rose up on all sides like the bars of a cage. They seemed to meet at an invisible point overhead, converging like the apex of a giant pyramid, giving him the unsettling feeling that he was an ancient Egyptian mummy buried in the middle.

  “Marion! Over here!” Vance was still waving at him from across the platform, holding a crumpled paper bag, one foot propped on a fallen, doorless refrigerator. “I’ve got lunch!”

  At the sound of Poppy’s voice — and the promise of food — Marion forgot everything else, his doubts and fears immediately overwhelmed by his growling stomach and childish sense of excitement.

  “Coming!” He sprinted toward Vance, jumping over a mound of smashed satellite stands and broken flashphones, feeling like he was running through some sort of forgotten technology museum.

  “You hungry?” Vance was standing over a checkered blanket, its corners anchored to the metal floor by an assortment of wrapped sandwiches, deli salads, Italian pastries and fresh fruit. Marion swooned when he saw it, his appetite exploding.

  “I’m starving.” Without waiting for an invitation, Marion dropped to his knees and dove in, his mouth instantly stuffed to overflowing, a hastily grabbed plastic fork nearly snapping beneath his vigorous attack.

  “Been a while, huh?” Vance laughed. Marion nodded happily, pausing just long enough to open a diet cola, his other hand already unwrapping another turkey sandwich.

  Vance stood quietly by, watching the boy gorge himself, amazed that such a skinny kid could eat so much, so quickly. He glanced back at the van, sensing no movement behind the open doors. She’s out for another hour, at least. Plenty of time, he figured. More than enough time to extract the truth.

  How in the world did they get this far? Vance watched Marion eat, trying to discern something remarkable about the boy. All he found was a gawky, malnourished child, gobbling greasy deli food like a famished vulture over fresh roadkill. It has to be the girl. Though he had resisted the idea until now, Vance couldn’t help but turn his eye toward the mysterious Allison Rayel.

  The girl was a puzzle, that was for sure. Vance certainly didn’t believe that she was a criminal mastermind, as Matsumoto apparently did — he wasn’t nearly that gullible. But there was something special about her, something extraordinary. She had proven herself to be unexpectedly strong — strong enough to make it this far, and smart enough to evade capture.

  And lucky. Vance grimaced, marveling at the power of fate. That’s all it took, he thought — one goddamn nurse. One frightened old woman, five kilos of hamburger, and the whole plan had collapsed. Was it just luck? Vance didn’t believe it — couldn’t believe it. It had to be something more.

  “Marion?” Vance forced a smile, projecting as much fatherly warmth as he could manage. Marion paused mid-lunge, a trail of humus dribbling down his chin. “Who is that girl? Your girlfriend?”

  Vance was surprised to see Marion blush, color rushing into his pale cheeks. “No. Not my girlfriend, really. We just met.”

  “Really?” He scrutinized Marion, trying to detect if the boy was lying. “When?”

  “At the riot. She ran into me.” Marion started eating again, his eyes wide with pleasure. Whether he was reliving the memory, or simply happy to be eating, Vance couldn’t really tell.

  What was their game? Vance was convinced that Allison had some kind of motivation — she had to. Normal people didn’t just pick up and start level-jumping for no discernible reason. Marion was a mentally deficient nomad, but Allison Rayel had a perfectly decent life in the city, as far as his minions could tell. She had a steady job, a fair number of friends, and only one blot on her criminal record: the civil disturbance charge that had landed her in corrections in the first place.

  And then, of course, there was the inexplicable fact that she was a phone jockey at Paradigmatic Solutions. She worked at Paradigmatic, and had made that damn prison phone call.

  Vance reached out and grabbed a ginger beer from the picnic blanket, cracking it open and taking a long, thoughtful sip. The phone call worried him. In fact, the phone call worried a lot of people. Not five minutes after it went down, Vance had received an urgent call from Knox’s chief of staff, Mac Miller — which was about as close as you could get to the man himself. Mac had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the President wanted Vance to locate Allison Rayel as soon as possible. And once he got his hands on her, he was to use every means at his disposal to find out just what she was up to.

  Vance couldn’t help but smirk at the memory, knowing that Matsumoto would like nothing better than to receive an urgent call from the White House. But that was never going to happen — the Twinkie might have won the last election, but the big boys in Washington knew who really ran the show.

  “What’s so funny?” Marion stared quizzically at Vance, lowering a half-eaten dill pickle. Vance snapped out of his trance, crinkling his eyes with fake affection.

  “I’m just glad I caught you in time.”

  Marion smiled back, looking genuinely touched. “So am I.”

  Vance motioned toward a box stuffed with cannoli and Italian cookies. “Have some desert. We can talk when you’re done.”

  Marion plunged in, quickly filling his mouth with pastries. Vance kept smiling, his face aching beneath the strain, thinking Eat up, buddy boy — it’s your last supper.

  The boy was completely dense, Vance decided. Nothing made him suspicious: not the location, not the false sincerity, not even the amazing, impossi
ble coincidence of it all. He was blinded by his own false memories, caught in a trap of childhood dreams.

  But what about the girl? Allison couldn’t be half so stupid, Vance thought. After all, she had hacked into the Biosystem through a prison phone line, for Christ’s sake. She had patched directly into the damn voice bank, shredding the triple-redundant, fed-approved firewall protecting Project Sound like a piece of rain-drenched toilet paper. Vance scowled, drained the last of his soda, crumpled the can and tossed it over his shoulder.

  When Mac Miller had called, their conversation had been full of hows and whys and whos — but really, Knox had no one to blame but himself. After all, it was his decision to allow wired phone access in order to expedite audio collection. The idea that someone, in this day and age, would attempt to breach the system through a land line had simply never occurred to him (or anyone else, for that matter). It was truly comical, Vance thought. The Paradigmatic algorithmic array was, arguably, the Knox administration’s biggest secret; so big that even the Twinkie didn’t know it existed. Big enough that people had died to keep it undetected. And yet some 21-year-old phone pollster had managed to punch it up while incarcerated.

  It was to laugh. Vance suppressed a smile, watching Marion as he sucked the last smears of cannoli custard from his fingertips.

  “Better?”

  Marion nodded, patting his swollen stomach happily. He surveyed the remaining food, scattered in the aftermath of his prolonged attack.

  “Can I keep some for Allison?”

  “Of course. That’s what it’s for.”

  Marion grabbed the paper sack, quickly filling it with sandwiches and fruit. Vance tried to be helpful, repackaging the salads into smaller containers, knowing full well that the girl would never taste a bite.

  He took one last look at the van, finding himself sad that he would never really know what Allison Rayel was like. She had to be intelligent, Vance assumed, to offset Marion’s disgusting naiveté, and quick enough to compensate for his clumsiness.

  Vance couldn’t help wondering how a woman like that would die.

  “Hey, Poppy…”

  “Marion,” Vance interrupted, smiling. “You’re a little old for that, don’t you think? Why don’t you just call me Vance?”

  “I’m sorry.” Marion was quick to retreat, relishing the discipline of his long-absent father. “Vance. Where are we?”

  “It’s called the Barge. You know, like the garbage boats.”

  Marion looked around again, following Vance as he rose from the checkered mat. “The Barge? Why?”

  “It’s a transport, of sorts. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Marion hesitated, clutching the sack of food. “Oh. I was thinking that I might, you know, check on Allison.” He looked into Vance’s eyes, seeing a stern glare of disapproval. “She was shot,” he added lamely.

  “I know that, Marion, I was there.” Vance laid his hand on Marion’s shoulder, his scowl dissipating. “She was hit with an animal tranquilizer, okay? The best thing we can do is to let her rest.”

  Marion let his glance linger on the van, holding the bottom of the paper bag to keep it from bursting. “No one’s going to find her there?”

  “Of course not.” Vance swept his arm in a big circle, indicating the vacant terrain around them. “Nobody’s used this thing in years,” he lied. “Decades even.”

  Marion gradually relented, letting Vance lead him away from the van, toward the chained edge of the platform. “Then why’s it still here?”

  “Easier to let it rot than tear it down, I suppose.”

  Something about Vance’s explanation didn’t make sense, but Marion couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. “So what was it for, originally?”

  “To help with the Build. You know, vehicle storage, transporting building materials between levels, that sort of thing.”

  Marion slowly surveyed the junkyard, trying to imagine the entire thing flying into the sky. As he glanced around, he couldn’t help but notice all sorts of recently discarded items. Not just decent-quality mediascreens and appliances, but half-dismembered hydrocells that looked like they had been buzzing down the road a few years ago. But just as Marion opened his mouth to mention it, Vance blindsided him with a sentence that changed everything.

  “You know, Marion, I never really thought I’d see you again.”

  And just like that, everything came flooding back. Marion had thought he was beyond caring, and had purposefully kept himself from peppering Vance with annoying questions. But now that the man had brought it up, unbidden, Marion was seized with an overwhelming need to know the truth — a need that was so sudden and strong, his words cracked and trembled as they escaped his throat. “But why, Pop... uh, Vance? Why didn’t you come see me? I waited for you every day.”

  Vance looked back, his face masked in shadow. “They wouldn’t let me, Marion. After a while, they wouldn’t let me see you anymore — they said I was getting too attached.”

  “Who?”

  Vance stopped walking, turning to meet Marion’s expectant gaze. “The government, Marion. The people I work for, and the ones who control them. They were afraid, Marion. Afraid that my affection for you would start to cloud my judgment.”

  Marion squinted, seeing the Poppy he once knew: the furry explosion of wild hair and unkempt beard, the ruddy skin glowing in the afternoon sun.

  “But you found me. You found me and Allison, and you saved us.”

  Vance smiled, but the creases in his weathered face expressed only sadness. “Well, to be honest, I knew exactly where to look,” he admitted. “You see, I’ve been tracking them as they followed you, every step of the way. But once I realized how far they were willing to go, what they were planning... ”

  Marion waited expectantly, but Vance seemed lost in thought. He finally spun away and began walking again, muttering as he headed toward the roped-off corner of the Barge.

  “I couldn’t let them kill you, Marion. I just couldn’t.”

  “Kill us?” Marion’s heart began to pound. He knew instantly that it was true — knew in his bones that those mutant animals had been placed deliberately in their path — but he still couldn’t fathom it, no matter how hard he tried. “But why would they do that? Why do they want us dead?”

  “Because they’re scared, Marion — Matsumoto, and President Knox, and all of their craven advisors. They’re a pack of frightened animals, fighting back the only way they know how. They see you as a threat to their power, you and Allison both.”

  “But why? What have we done?”

  “It’s not what you’ve done,” Vance explained, slowing his stride so that Marion could catch up. “It’s what they’ve done. They tried to hide you from the start, you know that. They tried to sweep you under the rug, because you were an embarrassment.”

  “Well then, why didn’t they just kill me then?”

  If Vance was shocked by the question, he certainly didn’t show it. “Believe me, more than a few people wanted too. But it was a different time, then — a different administration. That mayor was a stronger man; he believed in morality, believed that the government should act responsibly.”

  They were drawing closer to the corner now, the trash thinning around them, the Barge’s scarred metal floor increasingly visible through the debris.

  “And now?”

  Vance shrugged. “Nobody believes anything anymore.” He strode the last couple of meters toward the support, pressing his right hand against a giant steel casing that encircled the post like a sleeve.

  “You know what the real problem is, Marion?”

  Marion shook his head, suddenly apprehensive.

  “There’s no more leadership.” Vance reached up and, using a key Marion hadn’t noticed before, unlocked a small metal box bolted to the wall. “Matsumoto is a spineless joke; all he does is watch the polls and pace endless laps around his carpet.”

  Marion looked nervously in both directions, and was surprised to see —
halfway between this post and the next — a steep ramp, leading from a well-worn dirt trail up to a gap in the cable fence.

  He said no one came here anymore. Marion tried to push the thought from his mind, wanting desperately to believe that everything was just as it should be.

  “Just looking for scapegoats, is all. That’s why they blamed Allison for the prison murder.” Vance flipped the control box door open, which swung wide on well-oiled hinges. He pocketed his keys, looking back at Marion with an inscrutable smile.

  “Let me ask you something. Did you even know that Gracie Mansion was up here?”

  “The mayor’s house?” Marion faltered, surprised at the question. “No, I thought it was…”

  “On East End, in Manhattan,” Vance finished for him. “You see? This is exactly what I’m talking about. They’re running scared, Marion. They relocated the entire city government from Manhattan to Level Six, and never revealed the truth because they’re weak. They hide themselves like rats, Marion — afraid of the morning light. Do you know what they call this place?”

  Marion shook his head dumbly.

  “They call it the Bunker. In the original plans, it was supposed to be underground, to protect the ‘elected elites’ in case of catastrophic attack, but there were some logistical difficulties, so they stuck it up here, instead. Brilliant, eh?”

  Trying not to let his uneasiness show, Marion glanced back toward the distant van. “Uh, Vance, how long do we have to stay here?”

  “Not long,” Vance promised, still fiddling with the controls inside the box. “We’re going to get you to a safe house real soon.”

  Something’s not right. How had Vance found them, Marion wondered, at that exact moment? And why hadn’t he been in touch, through all this time, if he cared so much? Marion simply couldn’t believe that the man would risk rescuing him now, yet wouldn’t dare contact him during all of the years they were apart.

  “There we go!” Vance shouted. Marion was jolted by a sudden tremor, the ground buzzing beneath his feet like an earthquake. Across the Barge, rusting appliances began to rattle and shake, dancing like beads of water on a hot skillet.

  “What’s happening?” Marion asked, reaching out to grab a steel cable to steady himself.

  “Don’t worry, it’s normal. We just have to wait for her to warm up.”

  Warm up? Marion curled Allison’s bag of food into the crook of his arm, sensing a very clear and immediate danger.

  “So,” Vance asked cheerfully, “what’s with the brace?” Marion looked down at his chest, seeing the barely perceptible bulge beneath his shirt.

  “Oh. I fell and, uh, fractured a rib. In corrections.”

  Vance looked concerned, laying one hand on Marion’s shoulder. “Really? How long ago?”

  Marion opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly realized he had no idea. He counted backwards, night by night, trying to pinpoint the date. He and Allison had been arrested on Thursday, and then spent that night, and the next morning, in corrections. So he had fallen and cracked his rib on Friday, which meant…

  “Two days,” Marion answered, amazed. Had it really only been that long? It felt like forever.

  “Well, you’ve come a long way.” Vance ran his large hands across Marion’s torso, tightening his grip every time Marion tried to squirm away. “C’mon, let me see.”

  Marion tensed up, trying to focus on the simple truth: This man is not my father. He knew it to be true, yet found himself powerless to resist.

  “Here, let me get you out of that shirt.” Marion set Allison’s bag of food on the floor and raised his arms, staring helplessly into Vance’s face.

  Here was the dream, real as the sky above. The rumbling Barge felt like the rumbling deck of the ferry, the wind tasted vaguely of salt, and Poppy’s hands gripped him, firm as ever.

  “Vance?” Marion’s voice was barely audible, muffled beneath the fabric of his shirt.

  “Mm?”

  “Did you know my mother?”

  “No.” Vance paused, waiting until he had yanked Marion’s shirt over his head. “I never met her. All I know is that her name was Anne, and that she was a sculptor.”

  “Yeah,” Marion said, “that’s what they told me.”

  Vance smiled, pulling and prodding at Marion’s tattered bandages. “Does that hurt?”

  “Not too much.” Marion closed his eyes, thinking about Allison lying alone in that distant van. “Vance, why have you been watching me?”

  The question seemed to catch Vance by surprise, causing his fingers to bite painfully into Marion’s ribcage. “Why? Well, the same reason any protector would: to make sure you’re not in trouble.”

  Or to keep me from causing trouble.

  Marion began to wonder who this man really was, and what he was trying to do. He quickly decided that the only important thing was to get back to Allison, and to keep her safe until she woke up.

  “Well, this is completely useless — there’s no support at all.” Vance unhooked the metal fasteners and unwound the gauze, leaving Marion’s exposed flesh stippled with goosebumps under the cool artificial air.

  Marion stretched and felt his ribcage, finding nothing but a dull ache and a sense of freedom. “I feel fine.”

  “Well, that’s the important thing.” Vance turned back to the post, leaving Marion to struggle back into his shirt alone. “C’mon, you piece of junk.”

  Marion glanced up, thinking what now? He saw Vance press something inside the open metal box, then employ the heel of his palm to deliver a couple of solid blows to the hidden panel. The platform’s shuddering jumped suddenly from a mild tremor to a full and quaking roar.

  “There you go!”

  Marion observed Vance’s glee with growing alarm. “What’s happening?”

  “Don’t worry, Marion, we’re okay.” Vance shot a look over his shoulder, his eyes filled with mischief. “Oh, I almost forgot. You’re not still afraid of heights, are you?”

  Marion felt a quiet sense of shame, hated himself for feeling it. He glared right into Vance’s face, fighting to hide even a hint of fear. “No, not really.”

  Vance turned back to the controls, his fingers working feverishly. “Good. I didn’t think so.”

  Marion was sure he could detect the slightest sarcastic edge in Vance’s voice, and he felt an intense desire to run over and tear the entire box down from the post. What is he doing? But even as asked himself the question, Marion knew exactly what was going to happen.

  “And we’re off!”

  It was like watching an entire city block rise unexpectedly into the air. It was even worse than the lift, Marion thought, because it was so open. There was nothing between him and the disappearing ground but a set of drooping steel ropes.

  He turned away from the post and scanned the vibrating metal platform — a colossal, trash-strewn football pitch rocketing into the cloud-streaked sky. Though he tried desperately to fight it, Marion began to feel the full, debilitating swell of his acrophobia take hold, as dark and as strong as ever.

  “Is this great or what?” Marion looked back, and found Vance leaning back against the slack cable fence, his hair whipped into a wiry fan around his face. Marion nodded, inching away from the edge of the platform, watching the surrounding fields retreat beneath the rising Barge. Vance grinned at him, observing his growing panic.

  “It’s just a big elevator, Marion, that’s all.” He leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. “It runs on magnets.”

  Marion didn’t really care if it ran on human blood. He took another step away from the cable fence, his body shaking with the metal floor, his eyes darting across the receding horizon. Without warning, Vance reached out and grabbed Marion by one trembling arm.

  “Come see.”

  Before he could think to resist, Vance had yanked him right up to the edge, pressing him firmly against the swaying cables. “Look, you can see Gracie Mansion!”

  Marion closed his eyes, his hands gripping
the thick steel rope. Vance chided him, his tone less cheerful, his grip less relaxed. “Come on, Marion. I did this for you.”

  Then, with a swift and unexpected motion, Vance swung his hand up against Marion’s side and squeezed, compressing his ribcage until it creaked. The pain was sudden and overwhelming, causing Marion’s eyes to snap open.

  “Ow! Poppy!”

  Vance looked at him calmly, his lips curled into a humorless smile. “I’d hate for you to miss the view.”

  Marion felt the first real pangs of terror then — slowly realizing that Vance was not the man he thought he was, knowing that he was trapped on that swiftly rising platform. His eyes tracked the Barge’s shadow as it grew beneath them, creeping over acres of weeds and dying brush in an ever-expanding square.

  There’s nowhere left to go. Marion whipped around, his head reeling, his eyes searching for any avenue of escape. The Barge looked increasingly surreal: a titanic chunk of steel floating farther and farther from the earth, ferrying a scattered load of debris into space.

  “Marion, why are you running?” Vance’s meaty fingers bit into Marion’s shoulder, his voice no longer paternal and curious, but harshly interrogating. “And more importantly, where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  Marion slumped under the weight of Vance’s hand, realizing just how easily he had let himself be duped.

  “It’s not important.” In the distance, he spotted a clutch of tiny houses, set inside a careful grid of thin gray streets and looping cul-de-sacs.

  “Of course it is!” Vance yanked Marion closer, his eyes blazing. “Why else would you bother?”

  The Barge seemed incredibly high now, sliding up the support posts with a grinding determination. Marion could see the narrow, grassy strip of the mall now, no bigger than a putting green, topped with the lemon-colored gift box that was Gracie Mansion. He turned and stared into Vance’s face, finding every trace of the dream obliterated by that scowling, angry mask. “It just happened, Vance. There’s no plan — it just is.”

  Vance loosened his grip, his voice softening. “Listen, this is important to me. After all, I practically raised you. Why are you causing so much trouble?”

  Marion was suddenly furious — at himself more than anything else. But Vance’s condescending tone — the very idea that he had once thought of this man as a father — pushed him over the edge, causing him to swing his arm violently around, dislodging Vance’s hand from his shoulder.

  “We’re not causing anything!” Marion screamed, spitting every word. “You’re the cause. The whole goddamn city is the cause. We’re just looking for a way out!”

  The outburst caught Vance by surprise, causing him to lose his grip on the boy. That’s not what I planned. Marion was stronger than he’d expected. Not by much, certainly, but enough to worry him. The boy’s fear of heights had obviously dissipated, and somewhere along the way he had apparently developed a spine.

  We’re too far up. Vance had anticipated a short trip, just enough to reduce Marion to a quivering wreck. But the sprawling deck of the Barge was still flying upward, easily within view of the mall, and the boy still wasn’t talking. Well, Vance decided, Matsumoto would just have to live with it, if he truly wanted Marion to die with his secrets.

  “Listen, Marion. Whatever you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it up here. I can promise you that. And if you’re trying to get out, you’re going the wrong way.” Vance let out a harsh laugh, sliding one hand nonchalantly into his right front pocket. “You do know there’s a monthly purge, right? They open the Newark Tunnel, let all the freaks and weirdoes out. If you want to go outside with the Brightlanders, wear SPF 10,000 sunblock and learn to breathe methane, please be our guest.”

  Marion glared at him, anticipating the worst. He thought about fighting the man, but knew that Poppy — even this older version, with salt-and-pepper hair and a few extra lines in his face — would always be stronger than he.

  “Tell me, Marion. Do you remember the ferry?” Marion blinked at him, fighting nostalgia. It’s a trick.

  Vance shook his head, his eyes suddenly heavy and sad. “Everything used to be so simple.” He pulled his hand from his pocket, holding something hidden inside his fist. Marion regarded him warily, backing away with barely perceptible steps.

  I should run now. He was a born sprinter, and would be faster than Vance — he was certain of that. And there was all kinds of space, with plenty of trash to hide behind. Marion tensed his leg muscles, knowing that it was his only real option.

  “I swear to god, Marion, I’ve never forgotten those days.” Vance seemed like he was in some sort of reverie, barely paying attention to Marion at all. “No matter what I’ve done since, or how you might see me now, I’ve never really forgotten.”

  It’s too easy, Marion thought. It’s almost like he wants me to run.

  “Just look.” Vance grinned, a red gash splitting his thick beard. He held out his right hand, unfurling the callused finger one by one. “I even keep a souvenir.”

  Marion didn’t want to look, yet couldn’t steer his eyes away. He stared into Vance’s open hand, uncomprehending, the disconnect between expectation and reality simply too wide to bridge.

  The statue was nearly unrecognizable, little more than a broken lump in the palm of Vance’s hand. It had obviously been trampled in the stampede, as the crown was bent flat and the body snapped in half. The green paint was almost gone, rubbed to random flakes, spotting the gown like leprosy. The bare metal was now covered in rusty streaks of blood — a dark mask splashed across that delicate face, brown streaks flowing the length of her robe.

  Marion finally made a break for it, spinning on his heel and preparing to charge across the open barge, thinking only of Allison, asleep in that distant van. But there, not five meters behind him, Marion found his path blocked by the hideous specter of Ian Moody, a gushing snarl torn into his swollen face.

  “Look what you did!” Marion froze, barely able to comprehend the words through the man’s shattered jaw. Loo wha you dih! A thick rope of bloody drool swung from Ian’s chin, and the disgusting, glistening sight of it made Marion step involuntarily back, until he felt the hard steel cable cut into his back. Ian narrowed his eyes and straightened his tie, an action that seemed both sickening and surreal — a monster tightening the noose around his crushed melon of a head. He spat onto the ground, his phlegm laced with gore, and began stumping slowly forward on stiff legs.

  I’m going to fall. Marion could feel the rush of cold air against his back, knew there was nothing but emptiness below. But he couldn’t take his eyes off Ian — couldn’t stop staring at the pummeled lump of flesh shuffling toward him.

  “You little piece of crap.” Ian managed to get the words out pretty much intact, the final syllable accompanied by a crimson spray of spittle. He wiped the ruined pit of his mouth, running his tongue across the remaining shards of teeth. “You’re gonna pay for this.”

  Marion leaned even farther back, winding his arms around the cable fence, pushing himself out into the void. Through the rush of blood in his ears, Marion heard one thing clear as day: the sound of Vance laughing and clapping, urging Ian on as he lunged toward his trapped prey.

  The van crashed though the first piles of trash with an immense roar, its blunt front end scattering cardboard and glass, the bumper trailing strips of newspaper and plastic bags in a fluttering stream. The motor raced wildly, whining like a power drill as the front two wheel reared up, then growling angrily as the undercarriage fell back to earth, scraping a bright fan of sparks across the metal floor.

  “My van!” Vance’s mirth was gone in an instant, his face turning a livid purple as his precious car crashed across the Barge. Marion threw himself forward, his feet nearly slipping off the platform edge, and fell gratefully to the hard steel ground. When he looked up, he saw the most beautiful sight he could ever imagine: Allison Rayel, strawberry hair flying in a wind-whipped halo around her head, knuckles wh
ite against the black steering wheel, green eyes flashing with equal parts fear and pleasure as she came.

  Startled, Ian whirled around and gaped, a look of confusion and anger filling what remained of his face.

  “You’re dead!” he screamed. Marion had no idea what this meant, or why Ian suddenly appeared even more deranged than usual. But whatever the reason, the man was now completely out of control, shrieking like a crushed subway rat and thrashing his arms around as he ran full tilt toward the oncoming van.

  “Damn you! You’re dead! You’re dead!”

  Allison woke up in the middle of an earthquake. She tried to remember where she was, but the combination of a splitting headache and her seemingly immobile muscles made rational thought difficult. She blinked and tried to move her neck, if only to stop the staccato rhythm the metal floor was beating against her head.

  “Marion?” She finally wrenched her skull from the floor, feeling like someone had replaced her blood with corn syrup. Why can’t I move? She was in some sort of metal crate, from what she could see. She tried to sit up, her body as responsive as a sack of wet sand.

  “Hello?” Allison craned her neck, finding a single ray of light slanting down across her legs, dust floating through it like tiny gnats. “Anybody there?”

  The metal box remained completely silent. Outside, however, she could hear all kinds of odd rattles and clanks, as if it were raining toasters.

  Where the hell am I? Allison strained every muscle, willing her body to move. Then, in a flash, she remembered the crazed dash across the lawn, the searing pain in her leg. I was shot. She pried her hand off the floor, searching her leg until she found the wound, a tender and oozing puncture mark on the outside of her upper thigh. As she pushed and prodded, she realized with some distress that she couldn’t feel her right leg at all.

  Am I paralyzed? Allison banished the thought, giving up on her right leg and concentrating on her left instead. She had a little better luck there, managing to bend the knee gradually upward, flexing her foot against the floor. She grabbed her raised knee with both hands, dragging her body into a sitting position by arm strength alone.

  “Marion?” Allison peered over the crest of her knee, squinting into the sudden wash of light.

  There were a pair of doors, directly ahead, open just enough to let a bright spray of sunshine in. Allison put both hands on the floor and pushed herself forward, crab-walking meter by meter until she could finally kick the doors open with her one good leg. Outside, the landscape was as alien and disorienting as another planet: a flat steel plain covered in detritus, all of it bouncing around like cold water on a hot skillet.

  Grimacing, Allison swung her legs over the edge and planted her feet against the ground. The steel surface rumbled beneath her, making her entire body vibrate. With great effort, she pressed her plush slippers flat against the floor and pushed her weight up, finding herself, against all odds, standing upright at the tail end of that dark container.

  Where is everybody? Allison looked around, seeing nothing but the trash-strewn ground and a distant fence. Beneath her, the rumbling ground settled into a steady buzz, like an elevated subway platform right before the train arrived. Allison bent over to explore her leg again, carefully moving her hand from thigh to ankle. She finally located the inflamed wound, a disconcerting dead zone on her upper calf that seemed to radiate numbness throughout her entire body. She straightened up and tested her balance, pivoting on her injured leg as she carefully swung her body around the open door until it was facing the side of that weird metal coffin.

  With a start, she suddenly realized exactly what she was looking at. It’s an automobile. And not just any automobile. This was a huge, rusting rectangular monster — the sort of boxy and imposing combustion vehicle that you never saw outside of special exhibitions at the Hall of Science. The idea that someone had actually driven this thing — had driven her — to some vibrating dump in the middle of nowhere seemed absolutely insane.

  Marion, why aren’t you here? Allison sighed and began to walk her hands slowly down the side of the van, dragging her dead leg behind, trying to ignore the gritty layer of dirt blackening her palms. She thought about screaming for help, but decided against it. There was something profoundly wrong about this situation, and she decided that drawing attention to herself would only make things worse.

  With one last struggling step, she reached the driver-side door. She paused, gathered her courage, and then darted sideways to peek through the rolled-up window. The cab was empty — a time-capsule tableau of cracked vinyl seats and crumpled candy wrappers. Glancing around furtively, Allison reached out and grabbed the door handle, managing to pop it open with a couple of awkward tugs.

  Then, before she could get inside, Allison was swept with a dizzying wave of vertigo. Her stomach felt weak and unsteady, and her sense of balance was completely thrown off, lurching like it did on the first drop of the Cyclone.

  She tried to shake it off, grabbing the top of the open door and placing her good foot on the running board. With an ungraceful combination of pushing and clawing, she managed to heave her upper body up and into the front seat. Still queasy, she raised her cheek from the sticky vinyl and saw the one thing she desperately wanted to see: a tarnished set of keys, complete with shark-shaped bottle opener, dangling from the ignition.

  Allison had driven her fair share of hydrocells, but had never been behind the wheel of a gas-powered automobile — unless you counted the replicas at the Museum of Natural History. Still, she felt like she could get this crusty antique working, as long as her sluggish legs would do what she wanted. With a sharp breath, she gripped the steering wheel and pulled her body up to a sitting position, dragging her dead legs slowly into place. Positioning one foot over each floor pedal, she tried to remember how they did it in the old movies. You turn the key, and press the power pedal, just like a hydrocell. Somehow, Allison doubted that it would be that easy.

  Still, she had no choice. There was no other way for her to move, and if there was one thing that she had learned it was this: to stop moving was to risk capture, and possibly death.

  The dashboard was a confusing collection of antiquated meters and dials, with a random array of buttons scattered around for effect. Allison sighed and peered through the windshield, her view obstructed by a solid crust of dirt that rimmed the path of the windshield wipers.

  I’ve got to try. She quickly pulled the door shut and glanced into the rearview mirror, seeing nothing but bolted steel. The rear section of the van had been sealed off, she realized, like some sort of police vehicle.

  She grabbed the ignition key, closed her eyes for luck, and spun it forward a quarter-turn. Before she could even hope that something might happen, the engine turned over and roared to life, adding yet another layer of vibration to the rumbling chaos.

  What now? Allison stared down at the floor pedals, assuming that the configuration had to be the same as a hydrocell: power on the right, brake on the left. With concentrated effort, she grabbed her right leg under the knee and yanked it into place, dropping the dead weight of her boot squarely atop the gas pedal.

  Although she was braced for movement, the van stayed stubbornly in place. The engine, however, began to squeal like a colicky robot baby. Allison looked around frantically, wondering what else she had to do. She began punching things at random, knocking levers and switches back and forth at random. The windshield wipers scraped across the dusty window, the heater blew a jet of warm air, and the radio spit out a burst of abrasive static. Finally, Allison found a long metal lever jutting from the side of the steering column, the angled steel topped with a well-worn knob of black plastic. Without thinking, she reached up and yanked it toward the floor, feeling it click solidly into place.

  The van jumped forward like a rocket, the hulking frame screeching over the surface of the Barge. Allison reached out and grabbed the steering wheel, but could barely control it as her body flailed from side to side. Her immobi
le foot was now stuck solidly in place, flooring the engine as the van crashed uncontrollably forward.

  Allison tried to steady herself as the vehicle lurched over the littered terrain, scattering chunks of debris as it went. A three-legged stool bounced off the window, followed by a tangle of connector cords and a sheaf of printed paper forms, exploding off the front of the van in a chaotic white cloud.

  As she attempted to steer the van, bouncing every which way, Allison caught only glimpses of the world in front of her. But then, as she finally righted herself and took firm control of the wheel, she found a completely unexpected tableau: three men, arranged in a perfect triangle, standing directly in front of some sort of cable fence.

  As she sped toward them, all three men turned toward her, but she saw only one face.

  Marion! Allison instinctively turned the wheel away from him, trying desperately to stomp on the brake. As the van began to skid, Allison swept her eyes wildly across the scene; three men, three strands of thick steel cable, a single support post, and, beyond it all, a swiftly receding checkerboard of land.

  Allison gaped in disbelief, suddenly understanding. We’re up in the air. She let go of the wheel and grabbed her right leg with both hands, wrenching it from the gas pedal, knowing that it was already too late. When she glanced up again, the edge of the Barge was only a few meters away, with nothing but a pair of steel cables separating her from the open sky. But then, out of nowhere, there appeared one final obstacle: a howling, disfigured creature, waving its fists in the air, bloody mouth working feverishly as it screamed at the oncoming van.

  Ian refused to move. Marion spun off the fence and stumbled away from the van, while Vance continued to curse at Allison from a safe distance. But Ian remained rooted directly in the car’s destructive path, arms raised, a deranged traffic cop in the middle of a freeway.

  She’s not going to stop. Marion watched the van careen forward with a growing sense of dread, realizing that Allison wasn’t really in control. As the van rocketed toward the edge of the Barge, he peered through the grimy windows, glimpsing only the faintest blur of her beautiful face as it raced by.

  Stop, he begged, as if he could halt the van’s forward progress through desire alone. To his left, Marion watched as Vance made one last attempt to flag her down, the side of the van rushing by his outstretched hands. Now only Ian remained, planted firmly between the van and the distant ground, his screaming mouth a raw hole punched through the center of his face.

  For the first and last time, Marion found himself praying that Ian would succeed, that he would find some way to stop Allison before she drove into the abyss.

  Not until the final seconds did Ian realize that he could not stop the van through sheer force of will. He took a pathetic step backward, watching as the looming metal grill raced toward him, the windshield flashing in the fading light.

  And behind that blinding light, Ian saw Allison Rayel for the last time in his life. Her face was pale and panicked, hunched over the steering wheel, her eyes as terrified as his own. Ian turned slowly, confused, his anger draining away. He had a sudden memory of who he really was, of his elevated position within the Trading Authority, of his beautiful shrew of a wife. He even thought of his son Brian, whom he hadn’t seen for three years, wasting away in that second-tier Shanghai business school.

  “You told me she was dead!” Ian turned and stared at Vance, his eyes pleading, his ruined face suddenly wracked with sorrow. Vance flicked his eyes away from the speeding van, smiling grimly at Ian’s bloody tears.

  “Sorry.”

  The blunt-nosed vehicle blew Ian screaming into the sky, shoes flying from his feet, tie trailing behind him like a tail. Marion watched him go, his body pinwheeling over the fence and disappearing beneath the Barge, his toupee fluttering after him like a dying bird.

  And then, not two seconds later, the van hit. It plowed into the thick steel rope with furious force, the squealing brakes doing little to slack its forward momentum. The front wheels plunged immediately over the edge, the weight of the van snapping the cables taught, ripping three of the metal fenceposts in violent succession from their bolted moorings.

  The noise was terrific. The van stretched the cables like rubber bands, filling the air with a horrible metallic screech as the undercarriage grated over the platform edge. Marion saw Allison, just for an instant, through the open passenger window: her eyes staring wildly, her hands clenched on either side of the steering wheel as she fought to maintain control. Then the cab dropped out of sight, swinging down below the lip of the Barge, the open cargo hold suddenly facing the sky as the entire van slid over the side.

  Marion felt his heart lurch, his brain so flooded with fear that he thought he might collapse. Then, just as he was certain the worst thing possible had happened, he saw Vance sprinting toward the edge of the Barge, his mouth raging, his fist shaking in the air.

  “That’s my van, you bitch! “

  Marion gaped, tracing the man’s trajectory, finding a pair of incongruously open doors hovering just below the mangled rim of the Barge.

  It’s still there! Marion felt a huge wave of relief, but it didn’t last long. Within seconds, Vance reached the battered vehicle and commenced stomping on the rear bumper, screaming all the while.

  “Look what you did! You know what this thing is worth? I’m gonna kill you!”

  Marion stood frozen, watching helplessly as the van rocked back and forth, swaying dangerously as Vance planted one kick after another on its swaying back end.

  “You want it? Here! Take it!”

  For a few horrible seconds, Marion was unsure what to do. He stood there, stuck in place, recalling Ian’s terrified face as it arced toward the earth, imagining every second of that endless plunge.

  Then, summoning a reservoir of strength he didn’t know existed, he finally broke free. Forcing all thoughts from his head, he exploded like a thoroughbred out of the gate, running full tilt toward the man he once called Poppy.

  Vance heard him coming, but turned just a fraction too late, catching the full weight of Marion’s body against his shoulder, stumbling backward in a twisting struggle for balance. He managed to plant one foot against the van’s rear bumper, and was spinning back to counter-attack when he felt, to his great surprise, Marion’s right heel driving painfully into his rear end.

  “Leave her alone!”

  Vance did a half flip off the edge of the Barge, his bushy hair leading him in an awkward dive over the back of the van. He fell silently, dropping straight into the shadowy cargo bin, his body disappearing into the blackness a nanosecond before the sickening crunch of flesh against steel. There was nothing after that, not even a quiet moan.

  Marion didn’t waste a second worrying about his onetime guardian. He dashed forward and fell to his stomach, bending as far over the edge of the Barge as he dared. The van was strung to the side of the platform by the most tenuous means imaginable, he realized. The trio of fence cables were gripping the front of the cab, balancing the van nose-down on a sagging tightrope, the windshield aimed straight toward the retreating earth.

  The land below was now so distant that Marion couldn’t discern individual houses — could barely tell the roads from the perfectly sculpted streams. He closed his eyes against the view, feeling a cool mist beading like sweat against his clammy skin. With a growing sense of dread, he realized that they were entering the cloud layer, which meant that the ceiling could not be far behind.

  “Allison!”

  There was no answer. Marion gasped against rushing wind, the world around him a clinging, milky white, the clouds suddenly everywhere. He felt the mist soaking his skin, shivered as he squinted desperately into the fog.

  The Barge looked about six meters thick, from Marion’s vantage point. The van’s nose had just cleared the bottom edge before its descent was halted by the fence cables, keeping all four wheels resting precariously against the side of the platform. It looked, Marion thought, like i
t was loaded into a giant slingshot, ready to be rocketed into the sky.

  The three strands of thick steel rope ran from both sides of the van’s crumpled front end, quivering as they angled sharply away from the Barge. Marion leaned out as far as he possibly could, peering fruitlessly into the van’s darkened cab.

  “Allison?”

  Nothing. No movement, no sound, no discernible sign of life. The driver-side window was closed, though, so he ran over to the passenger side and tried again, with no success. He would have to climb down, Marion realized. As much as the idea terrified him, he knew there was no other option.

  He began moving toward the support post, thankful at least that the distant ground was currently hidden from view by the fog. As he approached the taught cables, he stumbled across something completely unexpected: the overstuffed deli bag, still lying where he had dropped it. Without really weighing the wisdom of his actions, Marion grabbed the bag, lifted up his shirt, and secured it tightly against his stomach. After tucking his shirt into his waistband, Marion looked down at his newly distended belly, comforted by the fact that Allison would, at the very least, have something to eat once he reached her. If she’s still alive, that is.

  Marion grimaced, pushing the thought from his head as he moved to the platform’s edge, dangled his legs over the side, and gradually began to lower himself into the abyss.

  The braided cables were cold and wet beneath his hands, slick with beads of water. They were also an awkward configuration for climbing: too far apart to straddle, but close enough together to make standing difficult. Worse, while the trio of cables started out nearly perpendicular to the Barge, they gradually twisted from a bent fencepost to the van’s front grill, parallel to the bottom of the platform and at least a meter out in the air.

  Just don’t think about it. Marion planted his feet on the bottom cable and tightened his grip on the top one. With a violent heave, he yanked himself off the Barge and pitched forward, falling against the taut cables like a drunk sprawling to the sidewalk. Almost immediately, the deli sack got wedged between the fence and his stomach, causing him to roll dangerously to one side.

  He tried not to panic as his feet skidded down the length of the fence, the top cable slipping painfully through his hands as he fought to halt his slide. He finally regained control and hung there, completely still, for a good fifteen seconds — his heart pounding, his eyes seeing nothing but silvery mist as the clouds sprayed by.

  Eventually he calmed down again and began edging his body toward the hanging van. Halfway down he hit the crushed remains of a metal post, the cables piercing its twisted length like thread through a needle. He grimaced and began to navigate the obstacle, feeling as if every slippery handhold might be his last. He tried to concentrate on the van below, which seemed tantalizingly close — so close that he could hear the rushing wind whistling through the open passenger window.

  Don’t think. Marion was finding that harder and harder to do, his mind tracing the path of Ian’s body as it glided toward the unforgiving earth. He imagined the truly astounding amount of time the man had to mull things over while falling to his death.

  The Barge lifted out of the clouds on a swirl of mist, leaving a spectacular rolling white landscape drawn out beneath it. Marion was caught hunched over the metal post, his arms and legs tangled around thick cables. Don’t think! But it was too late. The vast layer of clouds receded below like a fantastic new planet, so crisp and solid that it seemed sturdy enough to walk on. Marion’s eyes gaped wide enough to cramp his forehead.

  Don’t. His legs rotated suddenly sideways, dumping him into the air as if he were dismounting a horse. Without warning, his body rolled into the air, plummeting toward the cotton hills rolling underfoot.

  Allison! At the last possible moment he threw his arms around a single cable, his legs flying down in a wild arc. The cold steel bit into the crook of his arm, peeling skin and flesh from his limb as he slid toward the van. And then, just as the pain became unbearable, his elbow hit the van’s bumper and stopped, swinging his body like a pendulum through the air.

  Marion looked up in amazement, shocked that his body was still tethered to the van. He watched as a thick rivulet of blood crept toward him, running over his biceps from his shredded forearm to his fluttering shirtsleeve. Then, as he dazedly focused his eyes upward, he saw something far worse than a flesh wound: an infinite expanse of steel, emerging from the mist like the sole of a giant’s foot, looking to crush a scurrying roach.

  Marion reached over and grabbed the fence’s middle cable, trying to ignore the grinding heat of his wounds as he looped his left arm up. Grimacing, he swung his torso until he had one steel rope nestled securely under each armpit. As he prepared to move higher, however, his eyes looked up and froze.

  Above him, the vast gray ceiling was slowly splitting, revealing a pitch-black fissure directly above the rising Barge.

  It’s opening. Marion struggled, trying not to think about how close the ceiling actually was. But even as he pushed his body up on quivering arms, he couldn’t stop himself from glancing skyward, where the ceiling continued to roll open like a supermarket door, clearing a path for the Barge.

  He teetered there for a second, his arms close to collapse, the weight of his legs pulling his body back toward the clouds below.

  “Marion!” Allison’s hand grabbed him so suddenly, Marion jumped like a startled rat, almost losing his grip. “Oh my god, hold on!”

  Marion looked up and saw Allison’s delicate face peering down at him — her red hair flying, her emerald eyes wide with fear, her porcelain forehead marred by a burgundy smear of drying blood. Marion gazed into her frightened face and felt his strength surge. With one final push, he straightened his trembling arms and swung one leg up, twisting and turning until he sat astride the cable like a drunken cowboy on a very skinny horse.

  “Can you get up?” Allison was hanging halfway out of the passenger window, her arms dangling against the van’s dented front panel.

  Marion nodded, his neck strained taught. He felt better, just knowing that she was alive; the driving wind, the retreating layer of clouds, the memory of Ian’s cartwheeling body, everything seemed to evaporate beneath Allison’s touch. Marion closed his eyes, raising one leg until he could plant his sneaker firmly against the fence’s middle cable, and heaved himself up, scrambling against wet steel until he was standing upright, his hands wrapped around the outside mirror, his eyes peering into the darkened cab.

  Inside, Allison was pushing herself slowly back, her body wedged between the dashboard and the window, her forehead gummy with blood, her face still slack with the effects of the tranquilizer. Marion reached out for her, locking his fingers with hers, promising himself that he would never let go again.

  “What happened?” Allison asked groggily. The utter befuddlement in her voice almost made him laugh. He didn’t know where he could possibly start.

  “A lot.” He leaned into the window and touched her forehead, gingerly pushing the gooey, woven mass of her bangs aside to inspect the wound. “What happened to you?”

  “Well, I taught myself how to drive.” Allison smiled, looking slightly embarrassed. “It didn’t work out so well.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay, I think.” She paused and blinked slowly, like an owl. “I hit my head.”

  Overhead, the approaching mass of the Build fell over them like a shadow, and Allison finally looked up, taking it all in: the iron-gray ceiling dropping down, the swirling mist all around them, the ever-growing chasm overhead that seemed to be consuming the sky. “Where are we going?”

  Marion shifted on his precarious tightrope, the wind rushing around him. The air seemed significantly cooler now, flowing down from of the approaching passage as if someone had just opened an icebox.

  “I don’t know,” he yelled, pressing himself against the side of the van and wrapping his fingers around Allison’s outstretched han
d. “It’s cold, wherever it is. Maybe it leads outside!”

  Allison opened her mouth to answer, but her voice was cut short by Vance’s angry snarl, drifting down from above like the voice of god.

  “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  Every muscle in Marion’s body tensed up, the sound of that voice chilling him even more than the freezing wind. He looked up and found Vance’s dark outline, his torso angled over the back edge of the van like a gargoyle.

  “I wouldn’t count on anything, right now.”

  The massive steel ceiling was almost on top of them now, a dirty gray expanse dropping like the bottom of a frying pan. The shaft doors were now fully retracted, revealing a giant square mouth ready to swallow the Barge whole.

  “You can’t stop us!” Marion screamed, glaring up into Vance’s gleaming eyes.

  “I don’t need to,” Vance replied, flashing a wicked smile. “The Build is sealed, Marion. No matter how far you go, you’ll never get out.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Allison said, squeezing Marion’s hand. “He’s lying. You know he’s lying.”

  “Oh, and Marion,” Vance shouted down, “not that you care, but I do believe that you’ve broken my leg.”

  Marion felt a pang of guilt, cursed himself for feeling anything at all. Vance leaned over the edge of the van, his agonized face the last thing Marion saw before they were sucked into the frigid shaft.

  “You’ve hurt me, Marion — badly. More than I deserve.” The Barge suddenly swept past the infinite stretch of the ceiling, the gray steel plates shooting by in a tornado of wind and noise. Marion felt his ears pop, and had to clamp his arm hard against the inside of the passenger door to keep from being peeled off by the rush of wind.

  And then, just as he was turning toward Allison to make sure she was safe, the fireworks erupted.

  The spray of sparks was immediate and blinding, fanning out in a fiery tail beneath them as if they were riding a comet. For one terrifying moment Marion was certain that Vance had set off a bomb of some sort. But then, as a wave of heat began to singe the hair from his arm, he realized exactly what was happening.

  The tunnel is too small. The Barge was engineered to fit snugly into the passageway, with just meters to spare on each side of the platform. The van was obviously a few millimeters too high for the space, causing the metal roof to scrape angrily against the concrete wall as it flew past, sending a white-hot shower of sparks cascading down the shaft.

  Marion snapped his head up, nearly blinded by the neon waterfall. The van was squealing in a non-stop skid over the concrete, the frame crumpling beneath the pressure, the fan of fire lighting the tunnel like a giant signal flare.

  “Get down!” he shouted, reaching through the window to grab Allison’s shoulders and roll her off the dashboard. She stared at him, panicked, and did as he said, throwing her legs over the steering wheel and falling butt-first onto the back of the passenger seat. The front window shattered seconds later, sending pebbles of glass raining down like a cascade of diamonds.

  “Just hold on! We’re going to be okay.” Marion couldn’t tell if Allison could hear him over the tortured shriek of metal, so he reached down and gripped her arm, brushing debris from her head and neck with his free hand. Without warning, she reached up and grabbed his forearm, throwing her head back in a cloud of rust-colored hair and flying glass. To Marion’s complete amazement, she looked perfectly calm, grinning at him as if they were on a particularly thrilling Coney Island carnival ride.

  Before he could appreciate exactly what was happening, she pulled herself up in one languid motion, wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pressed her soft, trembling lips against his.

  Marion was so shocked that he kept his eyes open for a good long while, marveling at her pearlescent skin, smelling her wildflower hair, savoring the dizzying sweet-and-salty taste of her mouth. Then, as if in a dream, the screaming chaos around them seemed to drop away, and he let his eyelids drift closed, a brilliant flower of flame still blossoming behind his eyes.

  The screeching echo of the disintegrating van followed them into the cavernous space, blurring their battered senses. Allison was the first to notice — her eyes snapping open, her hand sliding from Marion’s neck, her sense of balance already beginning to teeter and sway.

  We’re falling. Inches away, Marion’s eyes opened and met hers, reflecting the exact same combination of confusion and fear. They both looked toward the shaft wall, and found nothing. The roof of the van had been sheared completely off, and its black and gaping shell was now toppling backwards through the open air. The Barge continued to accelerate through the darkness, dropping the crushed remains of the van like so much ballast.

  As they fell, Marion did the only thing he could think of doing: he threw one arm around Allison and lurched away from the falling van, grabbing desperately for the cables behind him. For one incredible moment, it felt as if he might actually succeed — against all odds, Allison’s lithe body slid from the passenger window, her feet kicking free of that metal monstrosity as it fell. But after holding them aloft for a few precious seconds, Marion’s fingers slid from the slippery cables, dropping them into darkness as he clawed desperately for contact. From there, all he could do was wrap Allison in a desperate hug, trying to envelop her completely as they hurtled through the air.

  As their intertwined bodies tumbled crazily off the Barge, spinning into the void, Marion heard the plummeting weight of the van smash somewhere far below. He closed his eyes and squeezed Allison tight, hoping only to survive.

  The earsplitting cacophony filled the air, louder than anything Marion had ever heard. It felt like a physical thing, pressing in from all sides — an excruciating mechanical thunder, the screams of a giant machine tearing itself apart.

  “Allison!” Marion rolled onto his back, his right knee spasming with pain. He held the leg against his chest, grimacing as he tried to will the pain away. “Where are you?”

  If there was an answer, Marion couldn’t hear it over the shrieking storm. He grabbed his aching knee and twisted to one side, searching desperately through the dusky light. The ground beneath him was weirdly soft and spongy, its silvery surface crinkling like a paper bag as rolled over it.

  Directly beside him, Marion discovered the yawning chasm of the elevator shaft, still leaking a square of dusty light into the air. As he watched, the illumination from the level below slowly disappeared — choked from a bright square to a thin glowing slice as the colossal steel doors ratcheted shut. He whipped his head around, chasing the last threads of sunshine as he looked every which way for Allison. Then, suddenly, the darkness was complete — the weight of the huge doors sending a tremor through the ground as they sealed together, cutting off the last rays of light.

  What if she fell into the shaft? Marion pushed himself painfully to his hands and knees, feeling terrified and weak. We were together when we hit the ground — then I flew this way, and she went somewhere else. He began to crawl toward the edge of the shaft, trying to hold himself together. I can’t lose her. Not like this.

  Allison’s voice barely reached him through the growing racket, but it was just loud enough to make his heart lurch with joy.

  “Hey! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  He spun instantly around, not even registering the jolts of pain as he scrambled toward Allison’s prone form. She was lying on her side a few meters behind him, looking annoyed as she struggled to raise her upper body from the pillowy ground.

  “Help me up!” she yelled, managing a smile even in the midst of chaos. “My stupid leg still doesn’t work right.”

  Marion raced toward her, ignoring the throbbing of his injured knee as he wrapped his arms around her torso and lifted straight up, struggling mightily to bring them both to their feet. Allison tried to help, but her legs were little more than clumsy props beneath her.

  As Marion steadied them both, trying to find his footing on the soft floor, he f
elt a deep reservoir of rage simmering to the surface. They tried to kill us, he thought, his head filled with images of those genetically deformed monsters, the red-tufted tranquilizer dart bouncing against Allison’s leg. Poppy tried to kill us. Marion felt both furious and sad, his mind whirling. He wished, for once, that things would slow down and give him time to think. But, of course, that was not to be.

  The microwave careened out of the darkness like a mortar shell, its cracked glass door flashing through the dim light. It landed half a meter away, bursting against the cushioned floor in a violent eruption of metal and plastic parts. Marion barely had time to recognize what it was before he felt the sting of a broken hinge ricocheting off his arm.

  What the...? Marion looked down, uncomprehending, seeing the microwave’s shattered carcass strewn across the ground. The industrial washing machine fell seconds later, farther away this time, the front door flapping open like a screaming mouth as it hit.

  Jesus, it’s raining appliances. Marion jumped as the washer blew into pieces against the floor, the circular door shooting through the air like a giant frisbee.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” he screamed, yanking Allison away from the shower of detritus. “Can you walk?”

  Allison nodded, but her expression seemed less than confident. Still, after a cinema-width mediascreen twisted through the air and exploded directly in front of them, she managed to start hopping forward on her good leg, dragging her deadened limb uselessly behind her. Marion supported her as best he could, half-dragging her away from the increasingly deafening clamor.

  As they worked their way toward safety, Marion tried to figure out where, exactly, they were. The space was incredibly dark and cold, and the floor felt oddly like a plastic-covered mattress beneath his feet. We should be thankful for that, he realized. If it had been concrete, we’d probably be dead.

  As he tried to puzzle it out, he felt Allison tugging frantically at his hand. He looked over and found her pointing off to the right. He followed her gaze and, with a jolt of fear, saw the empty husk of Vance’s demolished van looming ahead. The vehicle was lying pitifully on its side, and nearly unrecognizable — the roof had been shorn completely off, the windows vaporized, the body reduced to little more than a gutted frame. Marion froze in place, his eyes scanning the entire area for Vance’s body. He found nothing, which made him feel equal measures of apprehension and relief.

  As they began to move forward again, Marion couldn’t help but drift a little closer to inspect the van’s crumpled carcass. He peered into the cargo space and found it smeared with drying blood — oily brown streaks drawn like paint strokes all the way from the cab wall to the rear doors. Marion traced that gruesome path in frightened silence, wondering where, exactly, Vance had disappeared to.

  As they reached the van’s rear end, Marion held his hand up, afraid that Vance might be hiding behind the chassis. He left Allison balanced precariously on one leg as he crept forward and stuck his head quickly around the van’s rear bumper. To his immense relief, the space was empty except for a long metal toolbox, which looked as if it had been pried open and discarded in a hurry. As Marion leaned closer, he noticed a few small cardboard boxes scattered around — all of them as ransacked and empty as the gaping metal case. He steadied himself against the bumper and leaned closer still, trying to read the faded print on the side of the closest box.

  The massive chunk of concrete plowed into the van with the force of a wrecking ball, snapping the rear axle neatly in half. Marion barely missed getting his head crushed, the rebar-studded boulder bouncing sideways and slamming into the floor directly behind him. He rocketed back, almost spilling over the pliable ground as he stumbled back to Allison’s side.

  Overhead, the rain of debris was increasing steadily, battering the dark floor beneath a sudden tempest of garbage, concrete and broken appliances.

  It’s all coming apart. Marion finally reached Allison and, without saying a word, threw his arm around her and kept going, moving as fast as his injuries would possibly allow. Allison kept up as best she could, hopping gamely alongside, palms pressed against her ears as a deluge of rubble exploded all around them.

  Marion had never seen so many displays in one place. It was like the world’s largest electronics store — stacks of mediascreens as far as the eye could see, lining both sides of the dark hallway. The creepy thing was how each screen appeared dead until you reached it, at which point it lit up like Times Square, displaying blocks of glowing white gibberish that scrolled by faster than any human could possibly read them. The first time it happened Marion almost had a coronary, jumping away from the flashing screen as if it were a flamethrower. But now that they had passed a dozen of them, he realized that they were triggered by some sort of motion detector — probably to facilitate information collection, either by robot or high-functioning autistic civil servant.

  “I think we can stop now,” Marion called out, glad to hear the sound of his own voice again. The chaotic frenzy continued to rage around them, but it seemed as if they were far enough away from the zone of destruction to rest, at least for a second.

  Allison glanced back down the passageway and opened her mouth to reply, but her answer was cut off by what sounded like a truck full of glassware plunging into an empty swimming pool. She swung her eyes back, looking worried. “Maybe just a little farther?”

  Marion nodded, following closely behind her. He felt oddly bereft now that she wasn’t leaning on him, even though he knew he should be overjoyed that she could walk on her own. Besides, the corridor wasn’t really wide enough for them to walk two abreast. In fact, this particular hallway seemed almost like an afterthought — a thin crevasse splitting the gleaming banks of monitors.

  Marion felt completely disoriented, unable to fully grasp what was going on. They had found their way into this glassy chasm via a set of molded plastic steps, which had appeared out of the pillowy ground and led them to a raised platform — some sort of polymer-composite boardwalk sandwiched between polished walls, where every televised eye popped open as they passed.

  But who’s going to watch these things up here?

  Marion couldn’t quite make sense of their surroundings, and that — combined with the fact that Vance was still out there, searching for them — made him very nervous indeed.

  “Hey, look at this!” Allison began moving faster, stumping forward like a zombie on unsteady legs.

  “Hold on, you’re gonna kill yourself.” Marion ran to catch up, afraid that she was going to pitch forward onto the hard polymer floor.

  “Can’t you see it?”

  Marion followed her pointing finger, and saw a faint glow lightening the gloom ahead. A few steps further on, he realized that the hallway terminated directly ahead, feeding into a dimly lit room. The fact that this could be a bad thing obviously hadn’t occurred to Allison, who was rushing headlong into the light.

  “Allison,” Marion hissed, trying to warn her, realizing that it was already too late. She staggered into the room ahead of him and spun around, urging him on. He followed her reluctantly, moving into the space in a defensive crouch. But once he saw it, his fears faded. It was nothing more than a small, circular room with a half-dozen hallways sprouting off in all directions — an architectural crossroads where multiple passageways converged.

  “See, isn’t this better? We’ve got more light, and it’s much easier to see if anyone else is coming.” Allison reached out to grab Marion’s arm, but her hand stopped halfway, hovering in the cold air as her eyes grew wide. “Oh my god, Marion, you’re bleeding.”

  Marion looked down with alarm, afraid that he was actually wounded. Then he saw the stain spreading across his sagging belly and began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?” Allison’s voice wavered between concern and annoyance, her eyes still fixed on his shirtfront.

  “This.” Marion untucked his shirt, spilling the gelatinous contents onto the floor. Allison jerked back, as if an alien ha
d just burst from his stomach.

  “What the hell?” She blinked repeatedly, sure that she was hallucinating. The dark blood she had seen now looked like roasted eggplant salad. And next to that, she swore she saw a paper-wrapped Reuben half-buried beneath a mound of potato salad.

  “Look!” Marion exclaimed gleefully. “I brought you lunch.”

  For a few seconds, Allison couldn’t move. Her mouth filled with saliva, and her stomach roared like a bear leaving hibernation.

  “What, aren’t you hungry?”

  “Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Allison dropped to her knees and grabbed the sandwich, tearing into it with such gusto that she ended up swallowing a sizable chunk of wax paper along with the pastrami.

  Marion watched her happily, feeling the pleasure of the meal all over again. Even the carton of orange juice had remained miraculously intact, although the liquid inside had been whipped into a warm froth. Allison didn’t care, gulping it eagerly between ravenous bites.

  “Oh my god,” Allison said, her words muffled behind a mouthful of food. “Where did all of this come from?”

  Marion shrugged, not wanting to ruin the moment. “It’s a long story.”

  He leaned back, searching the surrounding hallways for movement as Allison ate her fill. Behind them, the ongoing avalanche of debris was beginning to dwindle, fading from a pounding earthquake to a sporadic rumble.

  Marion squinted into the gloom, wondering what could possibly lie ahead. How much farther can it be? It was impossible to tell, really — escape could be just around the next corner, or ten levels away. The Build seemed to go on forever.

  “So where the hell are we?” Allison asked, tonguing crumbs of pound cake from a plastic wrapper.

  Marion grinned, watching her pink tongue flick in and out like a cat lapping cream. “I think we’re inside the brain.”

  “The brain? You mean the Biosystem?”

  “Yes, that. Along with communications centers, diagnostic stations — everything that keeps this thing running.” Marion looked around, marveling that every single thing the Build did — every cloud, every breeze, every drop of snow or rain — started right here. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s why there’s no real lighting up here, no chairs or tables or vending machines. And it would also explain why it’s so damn cold, and why the floor is covered with insulation.”

  “Oh, is that what it is?” Allison peered through the grated floor, squinting to make out the pillowy metallic surface beneath them. “I thought maybe we had landed in a mattress factory.”

  “I could be wrong,” Marion said, “but I just can’t imagine what else this place could be.”

  “No, you’re right. I’m sure of it.” Allison swiveled her head and scanned the large circular room, counting at least a dozen passages shooting off the main hub. “So that means we’re close, right? We’ve got to be close to the top.”

  “Yeah, I guess we are.” For some reason, the idea made Marion more depressed than excited.

  “But that’s good, right? If we’re at the top, we can finally find a way out of this pit.”

  Marion sat quietly for a moment, wanting to believe it. “I’m just worried,” he finally replied, glancing over his shoulder. “What if Poppy is right? What if there’s no way out?”

  “Poppy?” Allison said the name as if spitting out a gnat. “Who’s Poppy?”

  Marion sighed, disgusted with himself for using that stupid name. “He was that horrible guy on the van. His real name’s Vance. He used to be…” Marion stalled, searching for the right word, “my guardian, I guess. A long time ago.”

  “At the Center?”

  Marion nodded. “He was sent to look after me, I guess. You know, to keep me from causing trouble.”

  “And is that why he drove us all the way out to that flying landfill? To keep us from causing trouble?”

  “Yeah. But I think he also wanted to know what we were up to — why we kept going up, when any normal person would have turned around a long time ago.”

  “Well, did you explain to him that if they would just stop chasing us, maybe we’d stop running? I mean, it’s not like we want to be up here, freezing our butts off in some freaky computerized neocortex.”

  “Somehow I don’t think he would have believed that.”

  They sat silently for a while — Allison gathering up all of the empty cartons and wrappers, Marion peering down each hallway in turn, wishing he knew where the hell Vance was.

  “So why did they keep you at all? Do you ever wonder about that?” Allison turned toward Marion, looking indignant. “Why didn’t they find some nice couple to adopt you, or turn you over to child protective services or something?”

  “Well, Vance used to tell me that I was special — that the doctors wanted to observe my development, because I had been such a tenacious newborn. But that was obviously a load of crap — I knew as much even back then. In reality, I think they were just scared that the truth would get out, and they’d be forced to shut down the Center.” Marion paused, shaking his head. “To be honest, I’m not surprised that they let me live at the Center — I’m surprised that Vance let me live at all.”

  “No, come on.” Allison reached out and grabbed his hand, looking shocked. “He would have let them kill a baby?”

  Marion nodded, looking wrung out. “I’m pretty sure he would have been happy to do it himself.”

  Allison stared at him, not sure what to say. She squeezed his hand and tried to imagine him as a child, climbing the trees in Foley Square, a skinny kid in sneakers trying to act like his life was normal. If she squinted, she could still see the little boy lurking beneath that serious expression: the dimples that appeared when he smiled, adorably out of place on his gaunt cheeks, the tousled and unkempt hair, the dark blue eyes that were still a size too big for his narrow face.

  “Marion?”

  He blinked, as if waking up from a nap. “Yeah?”

  “Thank you for bringing me lunch.”

  “Oh. No problem.” He paused awkwardly, unsure of how to say the thing he wanted to say. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “When we were hanging off the side of the Barge, with the fire and everything, why did you, uh, why’d you decide to...”

  “Kiss you?”

  Marion’s cheeks flushed so red that they appeared to be glowing in the gloom. “Yeah.”

  “Well, you just looked completely terrified, and because you were so scared, I started to get really scared, and it just seemed like a really good way to distract you.”

  “Oh. Well, it sure did that.”

  “Besides,” Allison said, giving a sly smile, “you’re pretty cute, in a scruffy street urchin kind of way.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” Marion tried to sound cool and nonchalant, but it was impossible to hide just how pleased he was. “Hey,” he exclaimed, eager to change the subject. “It stopped.”

  “What stopped?”

  “The avalanche, whatever it was. The noise stopped.”

  Allison listened for the far-off rumble, but all she could hear was the low whistle of a sharp wind rushing through one of the passages. “You’re right.”

  “What do you think? Should we sneak back there and see what happened?”

  “I suppose,” Allison said, looking back over her shoulder. “It’s as good a plan as any. Do you think that what’s-his-name, Blintz or whoever, will still be hanging around?”

  “Vance? I dunno,” Marion admitted. “He wasn’t near the van, so who knows where he is. If we’re lucky, maybe he got knocked out in the fall and buried under all that concrete.”

  “Here’s hoping.”

  “So how do your legs feel? Can you walk?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Allison stretched her left leg out in front of her and, with some effort, unfolded her other leg to lay beside it. “The right one’s still a little dodgy. I can’t really feel much above the knee.”

 
; Marion reached out and cupped his hand gently over her right knee, giving it a gentle squeeze.

  “Can you feel that?”

  “Barely. Try a little higher.” She watched with amusement as Marion swallowed nervously and inched his hand up over her knee, kneading her bone-white flesh as if it were a piece of powdered pastry dough.

  “Is that better?”

  “Yes, that feels really good, actually.” Allison shifted her weight onto one arm, reaching up to push her hair out of her eyes. Marion continued to gaze intently at the floor, as if he didn’t know exactly where to look.

  “Tell me if it hurts,” he said, his voice so quiet that Allison could barely hear it.

  “Don’t worry — I go to this really intense Tuina massage parlor in the city, so I’m used to pain by now.” Allison stretched her body languidly, a sleepy smile stealing across her lips. Marion hesitated, his fingers pausing mid-massage.

  “Hey. No fair stopping.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Good.” Allison reached down and grabbed his wrist, gently pulling his hand up until it lay just below the frayed hem of her dress.

  “Hey, I can feel that.”

  “What?” Marion stared at his hand as if it was an alien creature that had crawled up Allison’s thigh all by itself. Allison slid her hand over his, holding his fingers until they stopped fidgeting against her skin.

  “I can feel your hand,” she said, squeezing it firmly against her leg. “Right there.”

  Marion looked like he was about to have a heart attack.

  “Hey, you want to see something really gross?” Allison released Marion’s hand and, flashing a mischievous grin, began sliding the wrinkled edge of her skirt up her leg. She pulled it back like a Broadway curtain, slowly revealing the pale expanse of her upper thigh, then the alabaster curve of her hip. With a graceful twist, she bent her right leg and angled the knee inward, gathering the skirt into a crumpled pool of cloth in her lap.

  “Is that disgusting or what?”

  Marion let his eyes creep up the creamy slope of her leg, his hand beginning to quiver all over again. “It’s not so bad,” he managed.

  “Are you kidding me? It’s hideous.”

  The bruise was the size of a poker chip, a wine-colored circle marring the ceramic-white skin just below the turn of her hip. The dart had left a deep pencil-point of a wound, making the bruise look disturbingly like an angry red eye.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Allison tilted her head, her sage-colored eyes finding his. “It’s still numb. I bet it’s going to hurt like hell once the tranquilizer wears off, though.”

  “I’m sorry they hurt you,” Marion whispered, finding it hard to speak. He leaned forward, his hand drifting up the length of her wounded leg. Her skin slid smoothly beneath his palm until he reached the puncture wound, which rose angrily from her flesh.

  “Shh.” Allison leaned into his embrace, covering his hand beneath her own, holding it tight against her hip. “It doesn’t hurt now.”

  It was, Marion would later admit, the first proper kiss of his life. He’d had some practice in the Medical Center, where the precocious daughter of a night nurse had used him as a stand-in for her high-school crush. But he had felt nothing then, and that disappointment had followed him through the few romantic encounters he had stumbled upon while wandering the streets of New York. But this — this was something else entirely: a dizzying and passionate blur, a moment so intense that it eclipsed all rational thought. Marion momentarily lost himself in that embrace, every nerve in his body tingling, his mind reeling with pleasure. It was only when their lips parted, and Marion’s brain returned slowly to earth, that he began to realize the depth of their predicament.

  “Allison?”

  “Yes?” She smiled lazily, her fingers grazing his forearm.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask.” Marion ran his eyes over the passageways around them, finding the exact same thing in every direction: endless banks of mediascreens receding into a dozen identical hallways.

  “Which way did we come in?”

  They were, without a doubt, completely and irrevocably lost. They had been tracing and retracing various corridors for hours now, searching blindly for freedom. Every turn seemed to pull them deeper into the labyrinth, each gleaming alley a carbon copy of the last. There was nothing but endless black walls — some studded with monitors, some smooth and shiny as an obsidian floor. Every once in a while a nearby mediascreen would flash to life, illuminating the hallway in a crackling wash of light. Occasionally they would catch sight of a monitor glowing far ahead, fluttering like a distant street lamp on a foggy night. But it would invariably shut off before they could reach it, leaving them just as disoriented and lost as before.

  Every fifteen minutes or so they would stumble across another circular junction, identical to the first, splitting into the exact same number of corridors at the exact same angles. From there, it was purely intuition; a questioning look, a shrug, and then a silent decision, plunging them randomly back into yet another dark hallway. After an hour of this, with endless backtracking and aimless wandering, the possibility of escape seemed impossibly remote.

  Marion had never experienced such a furious clash of emotion. On the one hand he was terrified, his heart pounding with increasing desperation. But at the same time, he had never felt so joyous and wonderful and good. He gripped Allison’s hand, pressing ahead, completely exhilarated. He could feel the hum of the Biosystem crackling through his body as they ran — an electrical surge that seemed to fill the narrow halls like a magnetic field.

  Allison spotted the ladder first — a faint shadow propped against the wall far ahead of them.

  “Hey, do you see that?”

  “What?” Marion stopped short, sounding worried. “Is it moving?”

  “No.” Allison took a cautious step forward, peering into the darkness. It was much clearer now: a single dark line cutting across their path, running from the middle of the floor up to the ceiling.

  “Well, at least it’s a change of scenery.” Allison broke into a lopsided trot, random mediascreens firing in her wake like camera flashes chasing a fleeing celebrity.

  Marion jogged nervously behind her, trying to identify exactly what it was they were running toward. “Whatever it is,” he muttered, “it better be dead.”

  Once they arrived, they found the most boring thing imaginable: a rolling ladder, its wheels resting on the polymer floor, its handles secured into a track that ran half the length of the hallway. Above its topmost rung sat a long row of slightly tilted mediascreens, all of them filled with scrolling lines of glowing white code. Marion reached out and grabbed the ladder, pushing it slowly back and forth as he gazed up at the monitors, trying to make out the text.

  “Don’t walk under it,” Allison warned.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s bad luck.”

  “Huh. Could it actually get worse?”

  The ladder was about three meters tall, its rungs worn to the dull color of pewter from heavy use. Marion wrapped his hands around the closest rung and began climbing, concentrating on the monitors above.

  “Be careful,” Allison called out.

  “I just want to see what’s on,” Marion said, smiling as he gripped the top rung with one hand and swung his body out. He was farther up than he’d anticipated, but as he looked down he felt completely fine. There was no dizziness, no fear — nothing at all, really, except a sense of calm brought on by Allison’s upturned face.

  “So? What’s it look like up there?”

  Marion glanced back at the mediascreens, which looked pretty much like every other monitor they had passed: columns of numbers rolling into infinity, following some mysterious, unknowable pattern. Marion stared at them for a few seconds, mystified.

  “Hard to say. It’s just a bunch of numbers —like a protocol, or a phone code or something.”

  “What do you mean, like a phone code? What’s diff
erent?”

  Marion frowned, trying to puzzle it out. “There’s too many digits. If it was a phone code, there’d be, like, three extra numbers — at the beginning, before the actual code.”

  Allison’s eyes narrowed as she tried to discern the tiny numbers. “Can you tell what they are? I mean, if you see a New York code, can you read the preface set?”

  Allison winced at her inane work jargon, but Marion didn’t even seem to notice. He scanned the scrolling columns intently, trying to find a familiar set of numbers.

  “Uh, yeah, here’s some: 358, 350, 345, 362...”

  “Queens.”

  “What?” Marion stared down at her, dumbstruck.

  “Those are Queens neighborhoods: Jackson Heights, Woodside, Astoria, Forest Hills.”

  “Since when? Is there some new set of phone codes I don’t know about?”

  As he gaped down at her, Allison lowered her head, looking slightly ashamed. “No, it’s not new. Those are just neighborhood codes — nobody uses them except the government. It’s mostly for the census, but we used them at work — you know, to target our questions and whatnot.”

  “Really? What the heck are they doing up here?”

  “Who knows — they probably keep all sorts of information stored away. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had my entire lifetime browsing history stuck on a server somewhere.”

  “Creepy.” Marion began to lower himself down a rung, but then spotted a crumpled object nearby and froze. “Hey,” he hissed, gesturing over Allison’s head, “what’s that? Up against the wall behind you.”

  Allison turned to look, squinting at the floor. As she walked over and squatted down in front of it, Marion slowly spider-walked the ladder closer with his hands.

  “Weird. It’s a comic book.” Allison turned around and held up the flimsy booklet, which was ragged and dog-eared from overuse. The cover showed a man in armor, pressing a buxom young lass to his steely breast. Allison stared at it, laughing, then began flipping through its ratty pages.

  “It’s called Tales of Chivalry and Romance.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Marion scrambled down the ladder and hopped to the floor, peering at the thing over Allison’s shoulder. “Who reads this stuff?”

  “Nobody I know, that’s for sure.” Allison scanned a page filled with knights on horseback hacking at each other with swords. “This looks pretty old. It must’ve come out around the time Sir Gowan was so popular.”

  “Sir whozzit?”

  “You know, the movie? With that ultimate squash player wearing those ridiculous hair extensions? You never saw that?”

  “Uh, no,” Marion admitted. “To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.”

  “Wow, Marion — you really are hopeless.” Allison was surprised to see Marion looking slightly hurt, so she quickly tried to reassure him. “Anyway, it was terrible — you’re lucky you missed it. The only reason people went to see it is because it was shot outside of the Toronto Tower, and some of the battle scenes supposedly used actual Brightlanders.”

  “It was terrible?”

  “Oh, completely. All of these genetically enhanced slabs of beef strutting around in polished armor, and all of the women barely dressed, swooning incessantly.” Without warning, Allison dropped the comic book and fell into Marion’s arms, causing him to stumble beneath her unexpected weight. “Oh, you brute!” she cried, her voice rising into a breathy Irish brogue. “You beastie! You’ll be the death of me!”

  Marion laughed incredulously. “Beastie?”

  “Do what you will,” Allison moaned, pressing one hand to her forehead, closing her eyes in tearful defeat. “I no longer wish to live.”

  “Pity,” Marion said, grinning slyly. “Thou wert a comely wench.” He pulled his hands away, letting her drop. She landed on her rear end, eyes popping open in stunned surprise.

  “Marion!”

  “Ha! Who’s hopeless now?”

  Allison swatted weakly at his ankle. “Jerk.”

  “Hey, I owed you one.”

  “The hell you did.”

  Marion held out his hand, looking both guilty and pleased. “I’m sorry, really I am. Are you all right?”

  “No,” Allison snapped, smacking his palm. “My butt hurts.” She reached over and snatched the comic from the floor, frowning angrily. “You’re lucky I don’t leave you altogether.”

  “And go where?”

  Allison pulled herself to her feet and smoothed her skirt, ignoring him. She opened the comic and began to study it intently.

  “Seriously,” Marion asked, “who reads this stuff?”

  “Lots of people,” Allison shot back, “it’s romantic.” She flipped a few pages, reading aloud. “It is thee, Lancelot, whom I truly love. Thee, and not my husband the king.”

  Marion tried not to laugh, peering over her shoulder as he dropped his voice into a deep baritone. “Dearest Guinevere, though I have sworn allegiance to Arthur, my heart doth betray me.”

  Allison leaned back against him, expelling an airy breath. “Then by my troth, Lancelot, allow it betray us both.”

  Marion leaned over and kissed her smiling mouth, feeling dizzy. He squeezed his arms around her, as if she might melt, and began to speak, unsure exactly what he wanted to say.

  “You know, it’s like, my whole life, I’ve been in a dead sleep. Like I went into hibernation after leaving the Clinic, and I didn’t wake up until now. And suddenly here I am, in this insane place, holding onto you, and it still seems like a dream.”

  “It is a dream.”

  “What?”

  Allison spun around in his arms, her fingers snaking together behind his neck. “Listen — all I had in the city was dead relatives, fake friends and a boring job. Now, I don’t know why this is happening, but I can tell you this,” she kissed him quickly, and then again, “it feels exactly right. From the second we crashed into each other until this very moment, I’ve followed you and trusted you, and you haven’t let me down yet.”

  “Great. Way to turn up the pressure.” Marion grinned, glancing over Allison’s shoulder at the rolling ladder. “Anyway, we should probably get moving. That thing doesn’t look like it’s been used in a while, but you never know.”

  Allison nodded and took his hand, moving toward yet another dark corridor. As the flickering light faded behind them, she took one last look back, staring at the glowing screens and wondering what really went on up here.

  From fifty meters away, it sounded like the world’s largest cocktail party. Marion and Allison huddled together in the dark, straining to hear exactly what was happening. There were voices ahead — that much was certain. Hundreds of them, from the sound of it, filling the air with a dense and lively chatter.

  “What is going on in there?” Marion hissed. They could see the dimly lighted doorway where the voices were coming from, but not much more. The narrow hallway restricted their view, and neither of them were brave enough to sneak forward and peek inside. Whatever was going on, it seemed completely bizarre: not a soul to be found since they crashed into this place, and suddenly they were meters away from what sounded like a high-spirited soiree.

  When they had first detected the faint murmur of voices, Marion had been sure he was hearing things. But now that they had followed the noise to its source, there was simply no denying it: someone was apparently throwing a wild party in the center of a deserted maze.

  “I don’t get it,” Allison whispered back. “Why aren’t there any shadows?” She squinted into the half-light, finding no signs of movement at all. The glow emanating from the open door was as steady and pale as moonlight on a foggy night.

  “Maybe nobody’s in there.”

  “Then what? Mediascreens?”

  Marion craned his neck, confounded. “Police radios, maybe?”

  They stood still and silent, listening intently to the unintelligible swirl of voices. Allison finally took a tentative step forward, turning her head to try and bring the c
haos into focus. There was something about the layers of conversation, the clashing medley of words, that tugged at her. She closed her eyes, letting the voices envelop her, feeling her body lifted slowly into that cloud of human chatter.

  “Allison?” Marion watched her drift forward, trying not to panic.

  She stopped suddenly, her eyes flying open, a look of pure astonishment filling her face.

  “Knox!”

  Marion jumped, her outburst catching him by surprise. “What?”

  “That’s who I heard!” Allison began sprinting toward the open door, abandoning all caution. “On the phone, in prison! And here! It’s the same! Can’t you hear him?”

  Marion dashed after her, confused and terrified. He was certain that Allison had gone insane, and that she was leading them into a well-laid trap. But then, as he stumbled forward, the spray of words suddenly parted around him, revealing a single, majestic voice.

  President Knox. At first, Marion couldn’t quite believe it. It was like the audio equivalent of an optical illusion — one of those hidden digital images that snaps into focus only after hours of cross-eyed staring. But there it was, clear as day: a familiar baritone rising out of that incessant chatter, filling the hallway with the unmistakable, booming voice of the President of the United States.

  Why wouldn’t it stop? Vance leaned over and adjusted his makeshift splint, tightening the bloody strips of fabric around his throbbing leg. I ran every sequence, hit the emergency override, but nothing worked. He shifted his weight onto the wounded leg and winced, feeling the broken femur grind against itself, splintered shards of bone piercing the surrounding muscle.

  Vance tried to distract himself from the screaming agony of his broken leg by estimating the costs of the mess he had left behind. They would have to reseal the level, of course, and almost certainly rebuild the Barge from the ground up. And that, of course, raised an interesting technical question: If the Barge was out of commission, how would they transport the debris?

  Vance began to shuffle forward again, managing a half-dozen steps before his shattered leg suddenly gave way, sending him careening into a wall, icy rivulets of sweat streaking across his bare chest. He choked back a howl of pain, fighting off waves of lightheadedness and nausea by imagining Ian Ferris, that unhinged lunatic, plummeting to his sad and ignominious death.

  That is what senseless anger will get you, Vance told himself. That is how foolish men die.

  The nearest switching hub was far behind him now, along with his last chance to contact Matsumoto. But what was the point, really? Vance had nothing to report, except for the fact that the Build was falling apart. Let the Twinkie sweat it out, Vance thought. I’ve got my own work to do. He tensed himself, wrapping one hand around the fabric-taped stock of his oversize rifle as he pushed his battered body away from the wall.

  The pain was excruciating, but Vance’s physical discomfort was dwarfed by his mental torment. In his long and varied career, Vance had been shot twice, broken eighteen different bones, required hundreds of stitches and one extremely experimental muscular graft, but he had never felt quite so sickened by his own infirmity. It wasn’t just the pain, or the sight of that greasy-red strip of bone jutting out of his right thigh like a skeletal finger. It was the knowledge that he had been wrong. The humiliating realization that he had made a critical error — had completely misjudged the strength and willpower of a pathetic teenage boy.

  And that had made the pain so much worse. In the long seconds following Marion’s surprise attack, Vance had sat in the bottom of the van and watched the blood drool in a thick, gelatinous rope from his broken thighbone, wondering how he could have ever let such a thing happen. Then, realizing that it was foolish to let so much blood escape, he had carefully placed the ball of his thumb over the protruding tip of his broken femur and pushed, pressing so hard that his thumb disappeared completely into the seeping wound, the crimson jelly of his flesh closing around the trembling knuckle like a sucking mouth.

  He pushed stoically, his face set in a grimace of determination, until he felt the splintered ends of his thighbone snap roughly into place — not perfectly aligned, but good enough for government work. Outside, he could faintly hear Marion calling out for his girlfriend, and getting no response. For a moment Vance entertained the fantasy that Allison had been killed in the crash, but he knew that was unlikely — she might have been knocked unconscious, but she was almost certainly still alive, for now.

  Vance began to work quickly then, realizing that he didn’t have much time. He used his good leg to push himself up, then fished his keys from his front pocket and reached up to unlock the gun case. The rain of cartridges that poured down brought a smile to Vance’s face. He grabbed the well-worn barrel of his bolt-action Barrett and yanked it down, leaning over to stuff his pockets with as many bullets as they could possibly hold.

  Making the splint had been fairly simple. Luckily for him, the gun case’s teak inlay was easily stripped, and the short boards matched the length of his thigh almost exactly. After tearing his T-shirt into strips and bandaging the open wound, Vance used a tourniquet tie to cinch the planks into place just below his hip and above his knee, leaving just enough slack to keep the blood flowing. Walking hurt like a son of a bitch, but at least the bones seemed reasonably stable.

  The hardest part had been dragging his battered body out of the cargo hold. Not only did his broken leg scream with every bump and jolt, but as he dragged himself toward the rear doors — struggling hand-over-hand from one welded rope tie to the next — he was suddenly enveloped in a shower of sparks that stung his skin like a swarm of wasps.

  It’s coming apart. Vance felt it in every bruised fibre of his body — an elemental vibration in the frequency of disaster. Even as he shouldered through the sparks, rolled onto the surface of the Barge and hobbled toward the controls, Vance knew that events were accelerating beyond control.

  And so he abandoned post, leaving the emergency shutdown stuck in a processing loop, using the final moments before level breach to position himself atop the perimeter fence, secure the sniper rifle against his chest, and prepare to jump.

  For a brief moment, Marion could barely see. As he stumbled into the room, his senses were temporarily overwhelmed by the pulsating screens all around him. Everything seemed to flash and hum, an onslaught of light, images and sound that was as dizzying as it was unexpected.

  “I knew it!” Allison’s voice rose over the general cacophony, and Marion turned to find her standing just a few meters away, pointing excitedly at the far wall. “I told you it was him!”

  Marion followed her finger, his eyes scanning the flashing banks of mediascreens that lined the walls. The monitors were of all shapes and sizes, filling every available space like a glowing mosaic. Weirder still, they were staggered like children’s blocks: some jutting out, others sloping back, a series of shelves and alcoves that made it look like the inside of a glowing, graphite-gray honeycomb.

  The sight of so many screens stacked from floor to ceiling was weird enough, but once Marion began to focus on what they were showing, it seemed absolutely bizarre: there were shots of streets, of bodegas, of well-lit lobbies and grimy stoops, grainy security footage of dozens of distant rooms filled with unknown people. And each and every screen seemed to be cycling through an infinite number of images, flashing from one camera angle to the next, making it appear as if every single millimeter of the city was flashing before his eyes.

  But there was one screen, slightly larger than the rest, that did not waver. It loomed halfway up the rear wall, dominating the hyperactive monitors around it with a single mesmerizing image: the earnest, pontificating face of President Robert Knox.

  Marion stared at Knox, completely bewildered. What the hell was he doing up here? And was the man actually giving another speech? Marion wasn’t exactly a media expert, but it felt to him like the President spent an inordinate amount of time giving speeches.

  And what’s up
with his voice? Although he could clearly hear Knox’s rumbling baritone while watching him talk, the second that Marion let his eyes wander, the President’s voice faded into the surrounding chatter like sugar in hot coffee.

  Marion began to turn in a slow circle, scanning the hundreds of mediascreens around him, trying to hold onto Knox’s voice inside that cacophonous cloud of sound. As he glanced around, he was surprised to find fleeting glimpses of his old life, captured by cameras he had barely seen. There was a low-angle shot of the Medical Center, still shrouded in tear gas and police flares, a bird’s-eye view of Washington Square, and — flickering among a large block of subway security cams — his old sleeping spot at Union Square, looking as hard and uncomfortable as ever. He wasn’t at all surprised to see that another street surfer had already claimed the bench as his own.

  “What is this place?” Marion spun back toward President Knox’s giant face, completely disoriented, his thoughts scrambled inside a cloud of white noise.

  “I have absolutely no idea.” Allison shut her eyes, concentrating on Knox’s voice, trying to fade the surface noise into the background.

  “…and other enemies of the state…”

  His voice was there, and then gone, fading into the conversational swirl. But then, like a roaming flashlight through fog, it swung back again.

  “…we shall not allow such perverse and destructive behavior to crush the indomitable American spirit…”

  It suddenly occurred to Allison that Knox might actually be talking about them. The idea that the President of the United States was calling her perverse on a national feed was so surreal that she couldn’t quite believe it — she felt both thrilled and terrified, like a lottery winner who had just opened the door to the cameras in her underwear.

  “Hey, look at this!”

  Allison looked over to find Marion climbing the bank of monitors, scrambling from handhold to handhold like a toddler at a playground. “It looks like there might be an exit up there, right?”

  Allison scanned the wall, finally locating the distant recess that Marion was climbing toward. It was a narrow, shadowy alcove, tucked beneath the ceiling toward the back of the room. As she peered into the hollow space, searching for a trace of light, she noticed something weird about the ceiling. Upon close inspection, the dark expanse overhead turned out to be a braided canopy of cables — hundreds of rubber-coated wires woven so tightly together that it looked like the bottom of a glass tray filled with squid ink linguini.

  “Be careful,” she called out, her eyes flicking from Marion to the ceiling and back again as he climbed. “It looks like there’s a bunch of electrical cables up there.”

  Marion glanced up, grunting as he pulled himself up to a new ledge. “Oh yeah, look at that. I think it’s networking cable, though — most of it, anyway. Those thick ones, they could be anything.”

  She watched him climb, moving with quick confidence, barely pausing as he hopped from one narrow foothold to the next. It was amazing, she thought, how different he seemed from the timid soul she had met on the prison lift just a few days ago. But then, she had changed, as well. In fact, it felt like she had experienced and felt more in the past three days than she had in the previous three years combined.

  “Look, I can see up Knox’s nose!”

  Marion waved down at her, hanging from the wall like a spider dangling beneath the President’s giant lapels. It looked, from Allison’s perspective, as if Knox could swallow him right up, which was sort of funny when you thought about it: there was the President, promising swift and merciless justice for America’s enemies, while just a few meters away one of New York’s most wanted fugitives — a skinny kid in a blue windbreaker — was making obscene gestures right beneath his stern and scowling face.

  “…and, the present situation having stabilized, be assured that we shall bind together, as a nation, to rebuild all that was lost, and more…” Knox’s voice rumbled back into focus, jolting Allison like a jackhammer rousing her from sleep. She threw her hands over her ears and began to hum, trying to banish that thundering voice from her brain. But no matter how hard she tried, Knox’s penetrating baritone colonized her skull, ringing loud and pure as a tuning fork.

  “Shut up! Will you please just shut up!”

  “Who, me?”

  Allison looked up to find Marion poised just a meter or so beneath the ceiling, staring down with a concerned look on his face. She tried not to laugh as she shouted back.

  “No, not you! Knox! His stupid voice is driving me crazy!”

  “Weird.” Marion cocked his head like a dog, looking perplexed. “I can’t hear him at all. The speakers must be pointed the wrong way.”

  Allison opened her mouth to argue, but then realized that she couldn’t hear Knox anymore, either. It was as if the mere act of concentrating on another human voice somehow rendered the president’s voice invisible.

  It was so infuriating that Allison spun away in disgust, plugging her ears even tighter in an attempt to block every shred of ambient noise. She hummed and stomped, staring straight ahead, trying to force the cacophony of voices from her head.

  And then, out of nowhere, she saw them. What looked like a hundred screens, set into a perfectly geometric grid, each one displaying a disturbingly familiar scene.

  Paradigmatic Solutions. Allison couldn’t quite grasp it. She took a small step forward, and then another, her eyes scanning the dozens of screens with a growing sense of bewilderment. How did they get all of those cameras in there? She had always suspected that the room was under surveillance, but this seemed ridiculous.

  But then Allison noticed something weird; the screen she was looking at wasn’t her office at all. The room was roughly the same shape, and had the same brushed-aluminum Paradigmatic logo on the back wall, but the cubicles and mediascreens were in a slightly different configuration. And, while the weekend shift was filled with the same sort of art-school rejects and earnest immigrants who worked in her office, not one of them looked remotely familiar.

  “What the hell?” Allison took a step back, wondering if she might be mistaken. But the more she looked, the more she knew. It was a different room, all right; a little bigger, with a water cooler and a plastic carpet protector running down the middle aisle.

  As she surveyed the board, her eyes darting from one screen to another, the full meaning of the displays became apparent. Each one is different. From a few meters back, the images looked like a hundred views of the exact same room. But once you got close, it became obvious that each security camera was showing a different room, and that each room was filled with different people.

  They can’t all be in New York, Allison realized. She had known, in a vague way, that Paradigmatic had offices in other cities, but it had never occurred to her just how many.

  She began to scan the rows of monitors, left to right, as if reading a book. She did a quick calculation, trying to estimate how many people her company actually employed. The grid was ten monitors high, and eleven across. That made for 110 locations, with each employing two shifts of at least twenty callers each… Allison’s eyes glazed over as she did the mental math. 4,400 callers. Four thousand four hundred phone jockeys calling non-stop, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, over all four time zones. Figuring that each operator completed one survey every five minutes, that would mean...

  This is where the voices go. The realization hit Allison like a subway train. She stared at the glowing mosaic of call centers in front of her, suddenly understanding. The random lines of phone code, the irritating, garbled cloud of human voices — it all fit perfectly into place. Every call she had ever made, all the information she had collected, ended up here. In fact, there was a good chance that her voice was actually buried somewhere in this oppressive static, asking the same inane questions as every other pitiful phone poller slumped before her.

  There. Allison rocked forward, finally locating the downtown office among the stacks of impostors. The room was crushe
d full, even on Easter Sunday, people celebrating the holiday hunched over their phones, stabbing uselessly at their input screens. Allison wasn’t surprised at the full house — contrary to popular belief, holidays were actually the best time to catch folks at home, the best time to find people with the time and inclination to complain about the government.

  It was weird to think about her job, now — weird to contemplate her old life from such a great remove. Not a week ago she had been sitting in that claustrophobic room, wearing one of those stupid headsets, feeding the government’s endless appetite for information. Now she was a fugitive from that very government, climbing to the top of the Build while her old coworkers sat there, almost certainly poll-testing her myriad and possible punishments.

  It was truly insane, Allison thought. She lowered her head and began to turn, sick of contemplating her old life, anxious to tell Marion what she had found. But then, from the corner of her eye, Allison suddenly caught sight of Joanne, threading her way through that dim and crowded room.

  It hurt, for a second, it really did. Allison felt a sense of betrayal like nothing she had ever felt before. She stared at the screen, aghast, her body still half-turned toward Marion. Just the simple act of being there, of just sitting down at her terminal and calling random strangers, seemed like the worst kind of hypocrisy. How could she? Joanne, who had championed every cause, fought every fight. Joanne, who had claimed to be sabotaging the government by falsifying answers on her log page. There she was, the great radical, sitting in the same cubicle, adding her nasal voice to the cloud, living the same life that she had always lived.

  Can’t she feel it? Allison stared at the tiny, pixilated blur that was Joanne’s face. She was chewing her cuticles, like she always did, the phone clamped onto her head like a dental brace. Doesn’t she know what’s happening? The Build was falling apart. Allison knew it, and Marion knew it, and perhaps others did, too. But Joanne did not. Allison’s eyes became watery, and her hand began rising slowly, a single finger stretching toward the gray smudge of Joanne’s face.

  The screen crackled as her finger touched it, a sharp snap of static electricity reaching out to sting her skin. And then, without warning, everything exploded. The small screen disintegrated, a thunderous tremor shook the walls, and Allison was suddenly engulfed by a maelstrom of flying glass, spitting wires and blinding streaks of light.

  At first, Vance wasn’t even sure they had survived the crash. He had fallen hard, his body slamming painfully into the foam insulation mere meters from his van’s collapsing frame. The lacerating bolt of pain from his broken leg had knocked him out, for a short while, his lucidity fading into a fuzzy gray nebula of shock. But when he came to, he felt surprisingly strong. The splint had held, his sniper rifle was an arm’s length away, and the cold blast of pressurized air told him that the Build’s integrity remained intact — for now.

  Unfortunately, any chance he had to search for Marion and Allison — or, preferably, their lifeless bodies — was quickly lost. In the time it took Vance to struggle to his feet and wedge the rifle under him like a crutch, the rain of detritus had increased tenfold. And then, as he attempted to dodge the hail of discarded appliances and move toward the battered remains of his van, a chunk of concrete the size of a brownstone flew out of the sky and flattened his beloved ride like a beer can under a frat boy’s foot.

  It was then that he realized he had to evacuate, and hope that the fall had finished off Marion and his annoying red-haired companion for good. And if it had not, Vance mused, he was more than willing to finish the job.

  Tracking them through Control was, Vance soon realized, harder than anticipated. The polymer catwalks didn’t scuff or hold footprints, and any dirt or debris left behind tended to sift down onto the insulation below, where it was immediately dispersed by the exhaust fans. In fact, there was so little evidence of recent human activity that Vance began to hope against hope that Marion and Allison had been huddling like a pair of cockroaches inside the van when it was crushed.

  But then, at connecting hub 13, he spotted a telltale sheen of oil on one of the floor panels. After ascertaining that the stain smelled suspiciously like lemon hummus, Vance began a quick exploration of the surrounding corridors. This led him, not five minutes later, to a soggy bag of napkins and food cartons thrown carelessly beneath a walkway.

  Knowing that they were alive — and extrapolating their general direction — Vance was now completely certain where they were headed. He still didn’t believe that there was any real purpose to their journey — as far as he was concerned they were just two misguided infants, crawling over the edge of a cliff. But whether they knew it or not, they were heading directly toward the voice bank, and Vance knew in his bones that he would find them there.

  And so he redoubled his efforts, scraping his rifle-crutch steadily forward, ignoring everything else: the shattered ruin of his leg, the sticky flytrap of his throat, the rising temperature and thinning air that could only result from the Barge fully breaching the Build’s hermetical seal. Nothing else mattered. Nothing but the single-minded pursuit of the two most irritating targets he had ever had the great displeasure to hunt.

  Finally, in the far distance, he heard the sound he was so desperate to hear: the president’s voice, filled with so many voices. It was barely a whisper, carried on currents of cold air, but for Vance it was clear as the clarion call of a great trumpet, urging him on to battle.

  Marion was wedged deep into the dark alcove when the blast hit. He had pushed himself as far as possible into the narrow space, hoping to discover an exit to the outside world. But there was nothing. The back of the cavity was sealed tight — an impregnable plug of steel that looked thicker than a bank vault.

  The explosion, when it came, rose from his sternum to the top of his head, throwing him against the ceiling with a percussive blow hard enough to ring his ears. When he finally recovered enough to slide back and look down, he found Allison sitting flat against the ground, staring at the blackened, crackling pit in front of her with dazed eyes.

  “Dammit!”

  The voice was so instantly familiar, Marion didn’t need to see the man. He swung his gaze around, and then froze — his eyes locked onto the giant rifle, his brain straining as if it could somehow wrest the gun from Vance’s filthy hands.

  Without looking down, Vance ejected the spent cartridge, dug a round from his pocket and chambered it, snapping the bolt back into place as the burnt shell hit the floor.

  Marion tried to get his brain working, steadying himself against the wall, his feet planted unsteadily against the monitor below. An acrid cloud of smoke stung his eyes, and for a second he couldn’t see anything at all. But then the smoke cleared, and he saw Vance staring straight at him.

  For one infinite moment, Marion was sure that he was going to die. He clung to his cold metal shelf, his ears still throbbing from the blast, staring down at Vance’s upturned face. But then, as it became obvious that no bullet was forthcoming, Marion finally realized that Vance wasn’t staring at him. He was gazing up, but his rifle remained trained on Allison, and the look in his eyes was one of confusion, not homicidal anger.

  He’s watching Knox. Marion followed Vance’s gaze, and saw that the man was completely focused on the flickering image of the president. Why he was so captivated, Marion couldn’t imagine. But in that moment of distraction, Marion did the only thing he was capable of doing: he launched himself like a missile toward his onetime guardian, digging his foot into the ledge and pushing with all of his strength, catapulting his body at a lunatic angle through the air.

  The travel podium.

  The second that Vance saw it, he had to radically rethink everything that had just happened. His trigger finger froze, milliseconds from the kill shot — a shot that, after adjusting to compensate for the bent scope, would have left Allison Rayel’s alabaster legs pulling themselves in bloody circles across the floor.

  But there was no mistaking it. The untrai
ned eye certainly couldn’t tell the difference, but Vance saw it immediately. The tone of the wood was significantly lighter than the solid, old-growth oak the official White House podium was carved from. Plus, the presidential seal was attached far too low, so that it got cut off at the bottom of the shot. Vance had pointed this out to Knox on a number of occasions, but the media team never did a thing about it.

  He’s not at the White House. Vance winced, the import of that realization washing over him. The fact that Knox was using the portable podium meant that he was almost certainly aloft, cruising in Air Force, Marine or NASA One. And that meant one of two things: either the good citizens of Washington, D.C. were boiling over, or the United States was about to become a client state of the Sixth Republic.

  But more importantly, the fact that Knox had fled the White House meant that he had also abandoned every electronic security protocol surrounding Project Sound. Which meant that the President was now streaming live and direct through an untested satellite system with no delay and minimal safeguards.

  Vance opened his mouth to unleash a violent string of obscenities, but before he could utter a word the president’s image was suddenly obliterated, disappearing like the sun behind a whirlwind shadow of clouds. Vance’s internal alarm system exploded, but it was too late. He swung the Barrett up like a club, knowing that it was too late to draw a bead, hoping only to knock Marion out of the way. But the swelling shadow was dropping straight out of the sky, leaving no time for evasive action.

  With crippling velocity, Marion slammed full-force into Vance’s right shoulder, throwing his stolid 275-pound framed back like a dynamited tenement building. Vance might have still have been able to right himself, but the force of Marion’s plummeting body yanked his trigger finger back, and the Barrett’s sudden, explosive kick slammed the stock like a heavyweight punch against his shoulder.

  As he rocketed back toward the wall, he saw two things with fearful clarity: The first was the president, his mouth blurry with motion, an accusing finger pointed toward the camera; the second was the communications canopy erupting in a white blossom of sparks that fell through the air like fireworks, sending a hissing spaghetti of fibre and power cables writhing toward the floor.

  Then his head smashed into the solid lead shield over the server bays, and the scene went mercifully black.

  He’s down. I flew at him, and he went down.

  For Marion, that was exactly how it felt. He had jumped without thought, wanting only to protect Allison from being shot. But as he tumbled through the air — rows of glowing monitors flashing by, Vance’s upturned face spiraling toward him — he felt an unexpected rush, the intense excitement of a bird diving toward its kill.

  In the last milliseconds before impact Vance turned to meet him, but it was far too late — as his body flew furiously through the air, Marion knew that he could not miss. He was about to flatten Vance like an express train crushing a subway rat.

  The second gunshot exploded in his ear, but it meant nothing. Marion careened into his old guardian, driving him backward until the man’s skull cracked against the metal wall. Then he rolled off and skidded across the grated floor, leaving a bloody trail behind, fighting to right himself.

  As soon as he could struggle to his feet, Marion lurched back toward Allison. He knew that he shouldn’t turn his back — knew that Vance was still a threat, head trauma or no. But he couldn’t help himself. For the first time in his life, Marion actually cared more for another person than he cared for himself. He felt a connection so deep that it felt like his heart was pumping Allison’s blood.

  “Allison!” Marion staggered through acrid smoke, trying to maintain his bearings. A spitting curtain of cables dangled over the floor, shooting sparks like fireworks over Liberty Island. Marion shielded his eyes, trying to find Allison on the other side.

  “I’m here! I’m okay!”

  The sound of her voice hit Marion like rain hits parched earth. If he hadn’t been running on pure adrenaline, he might have collapsed to the ground in relief. But he couldn’t stop — not now. He pivoted toward her, muscles tensed to sprint.

  Then, on the cusp of action, he froze. His limbs seized up and his senses surged, trying desperately to process two things at once. The first was the sight of Allison’s grimy face, emerging from the haze of smoke like a dazed jogger exiting a cloud of manhole-cover steam. Her eyes locked on his, full of joy, and then suddenly dropped, her perfect green irises darkening to the color of peat moss.

  The second, of course, was the hideous sound of Vance’s voice.

  “Marion, dear boy. I do believe you’ve fractured my skull.”

  Marion couldn’t care less what he had done. Poppy was dead, and Marion wanted nothing more than to see Vance follow him to the grave. But the very fact that the man could still speak — that he was still alive, and armed — stopped Marion in his tracks.

  As he turned, he didn’t even bother to glance at his old guardian’s eyes, which were half-hidden behind a glowing gunsight. Instead, Marion focused all of his fury on the unwavering barrel of Vance’s giant rifle. It was greasy and round and dark, a metal tube pointed so steadily at his head that all Marion could see was an oily black ring.

  “Excuse me for not getting up.” The corners of Vance’s mouth jerked up, halfway between a grin and a grimace of pain. “I think I’m coming down with something.” He laughed, even though it obviously hurt him to do so. His chest heaved, and a few pinkish droplets of blood sprayed out and flecked his beard. “It just hit me — all of a sudden.”

  Marion smiled at the lame joke, but his eyes were filled with disgust and pity, not mirth. Vance stopped laughing, his bloodless face hardening into an angry scowl. The arrogance! To think that this frightened little boy, who used to cry at the top of a stairwell, would look at him like that. Vance pulled his body up, the rifle barrel not moving a centimeter off-target. He flexed his trigger finger, knowing how good it would feel to shoot, to watch the boy’s wry smile evaporate into an oily cloud of brain fluid and bone.

  “You know, Marion…” Vance began to rise, struggling to keep the anger and agony from his voice. “You really should congratulate yourself.” In the distance, Vance could see the flicker of Allison’s shadow, about five meters away. He edged himself slowly up the wall, watching warily, waiting for the perfect moment. He wanted her to be close, after all; close enough so that, when the 50mm round vaporized her head into a meat-flecked mist, Marion would be covered in the last pieces of her useless life. And only then, as Marion cried out in grief and terror, would Vance reload and put the little snot out of his misery.

  “Most people would have just bought a mag-lev ticket, or taken the Jersey tunnel.” Vance pulled himself fully upright, balancing carefully on one foot, the rifle barrel remaining, against all odds, trained perfectly on its target. “But you. You had to do it this way.”

  Marion watched as Vance dragged his mangled leg across the floor, the swollen, splinted limb more like a broken table leg than a real appendage. He was seriously hurt, Marion realized. Vance’s skin was deathly pale, and his clothes were covered with gummy streaks of blood and dirt. His face was torn raw, his beard jutted out in bloody, saliva-soaked clumps — and yet the gun barrel did not waver, and Vance’s murderous eyes never strayed from Marion’s face.

  “There was no other way,” Marion said, holding Vance’s gaze. “Not for us.”

  “Well,” Vance replied, flexing his trigger finger, “you made a tremendously bad call, I can promise you that.”

  It was then, just as Marion was preparing for the worst, that he saw the tiniest flutter in Vance’s right eyelid. It was a barely noticeable change — a look of concern that darkened Vance’s gaze like an approaching storm.

  Something was wrong, Marion realized. At first, he didn’t know exactly what it was. But then, as the voices came swirling slowly out of the air, he finally heard it.

  Or, to be more exact, he unheard it.

  The Voi
ce Bank! Vance was tense with fury, even as he kept his sighting eye trained steadily on Marion’s forehead. Of all the stupid accidents, of all the things that could possibly go wrong, this was among the worst. The President was now speaking through a direct feed, with little or no delay, streaming live without a net. As his voice filter began to fail, everyone watching would know it: every single viewer with a working pair of ears would know that something was wrong. They might not know what, exactly, but they would sure as hell know that something was wrong.

  Vance struggled to keep his eyes from wavering, forcing himself to ignore the live-broadcast debacle unfolding overhead. All he could do was focus on the problem at hand, and trust that whichever Project Sound audio monkey was currently inside the bubble would cut the signal in time.

  Vance watched Marion’s impassive face, studying his features as he absorbed Knox’s gradually dissolving baritone. Was it possible that the boy had known about the Voice Bank all along? Vance tightened his grip, wondering if Marion had somehow planned it this way. He had jumped for the cables, after all, flying his body in front of that intricate array. It was impossible to tell — for the first time, it occurred to Vance that the boy’s implacable stare might be hiding a truly fiendish mind.

  The idea that Marion might have outsmarted him, no matter how improbable, sent Vance over the edge. He took one last look at the boy’s sneering face, and then spun toward Allison with a savage fury, knowing that a single bullet would kill them both — in spirit, and ultimately in fact.

  Marion hit him from the side — a blow that Vance was more than ready to absorb. He jammed his left foot down, feeling the makeshift splint creak like the leg of a failing chair. His body stayed resolutely upright, his good leg crouching to keep him balanced. Allison was on the move, but not nearly fast enough to avoid annihilation. Vance followed the colorful smear of fabric, the darting movement of her arm. She was swinging something, he realized — an inept, little-girl kind of pitch, a weak and fumbling toss that wouldn’t knock a bird off a fence. Vance steadied his aim and fired, swatting at the swinging shadow at the exact moment his finger yanked the trigger against the guard.

  Two things happened simultaneously. The first Vance was prepared for, his whole body set to roll with the force of the blast. The second, without a doubt, came as a complete surprise.

  It stuck to my hand. This was Vance’s last sensible thought, his brain’s final coherent activity before his central nervous system exploded into his skull like an overheated thermometer. He thought, in that last instant, of sticky tape, of honeycombs, of the foul ball he had caught so perfectly in his minor league catcher’s mitt. And then his body snapped straight as a board, every muscle swelling to twice its normal size, the shattered pieces of his femur oozing marrow as they ratcheted painfully together.

  Vance’s fingers closed involuntarily around the live wire, his skin burned instantly black beneath the crackling electric flow. His firing eye remained open, bulging like a rubber knob from his face, while his other eye squeezed ever tighter, giving his face a grotesque, lopsided slant. Vance arched backward as the rifle fired, taking the full crush of the recoil against his stiffened chest. The shot barely missed, passing so close that Allison could hear the whine of the bullet and smell the acrid stench of her own burning hair.

  “Allison!” Marion ran toward her, his eyes filled with fear. Allison grabbed him so hard that it hurt, pressing her cheek against his, their breath raging together.

  “Oh god, Marion. Oh my god.”

  Vance continued to turn, the force of the rifle blow spinning him like a weather vane. His entire body was shaking now, his tongue a swollen slug spilling out of his mouth, his hand spastically trying to shake free of the electric cable. But with each turn he became even more entangled, the cord wrapping his body like a ribbon around a maypole as he spiraled around.

  Marion couldn’t stop himself from looking. He didn’t feel much emotion, really — there was no triumph, no despair, no sense of victory or loss. He watched almost clinically, holding Allison close against him, wishing only that it would end.

  And then, finally, it did. After several revolutions, Vance lost his balance and toppled, hitting the ground with a sickening thump. He landed face up, wrapped from his shoulders to his hips, the electrical cord biting into his flesh, his left arm lashed tightly against his side. The dying end of the cable finally broke free, spitting and snapping against the floor like an angry snake.

  “Hold on, be careful.” Marion pulled Allison gently away from Vance’s still-squirming body, watching the live wire warily.

  Allison kept her eyes locked on Marion’s face, trying to gauge the level of danger. “Is he…?”

  “Yes,” Marion answered, wincing. “He definitely is.”

  Marion continued maneuvering them away from the hissing cable, watching in disgust as Vance’s bulging, lifeless eyes deflated slowly back into his rigid face. Seeing his horrified expression, Allison began to swivel her head toward the grotesque scene. Panicking, Marion gripped her arms and blurted out the only thing he could think of to distract her.

  “I love you, Allison.”

  She stopped mid-turn, blinking at him as if she couldn’t quite comprehend the words coming out of his mouth. He rambled on incoherently.

  “When Vance shot at you, I jumped, and it felt like forever before I hit him. And the whole way down, I couldn’t think about anything but you. I was so sure that you were dead, and I just, I just couldn’t...”

  “Wait, hold on, start over. What was that first thing you said?”

  “I, uh...” Marion swallowed hard, suddenly realizing how inappropriate his declaration was, given the circumstances. “I guess the first thing I said was that I love you.”

  Allison kept staring at him, and Marion suddenly noticed that she was crying, tears coursing around the trembling edges of a smile.

  “Well you goddamn well better,” she finally said, punching him solidly in the chest. “I just saved your life!”

  Marion reached out and lifted her off the floor, wrapping his arms around her, fighting to keep his own tears from brimming over. It was true, he thought, every last implausible piece of it. They were together, at the edge of the outside world, and there was absolutely nothing left to stop them.

  “We’re free.” Marion ran his fingers across her cheek, painting her skin with tears. “We’re finally free.”

  “I know,” Allison said, her voice raw, “can you believe it? We’re getting out. We’re going to be Brightlanders, right? We’re going to leave this cesspool behind and live outside, and see what it’s really like.”

  “Yeah, I guess we are.” Marion suddenly felt dizzy with the unreality of it all. He took a deep breath, trying to grasp everything that had just happened.

  “Hey, can you hear that?”

  Marion looked around, unsure. “Hear what?”

  “I’m not sure,” Allison said, looking perplexed. “There’s something wrong. With Knox, I mean.”

  Marion took a half-step back, his eyes flitting between Vance’s smoldering corpse and the president’s looming visage. At first glance, it seemed like the same old Knox: broad shoulders leaning into the camera, perfectly manicured hands slicing the air.

  “And furthermore, until this crisis is resolved, this situation stabilized, and these heinous criminals apprehended…”

  But the more he listened, the more Marion realized that Allison was right. The president sounded wrong, somehow — his voice a thin, whiny approximation of Knox’s famously sonorous baritone. And it wasn’t just the president’s voice that sounded off — there was something weird about the room itself, something missing.

  Then, in a flash, it hit him: with the exception of Knox’s newly attenuated voice and the dying crackle of electrical cables, the room was absolutely silent. The incessant, cocktail-party cacophony that had been everywhere was suddenly, inexplicably gone.

  “Look!” Allison grabbed Marion’s arm and squee
zed, pointing at the giant screen overhead. He followed her gaze, glancing up just in time to see the president freeze, his hands held mid-gesture, his eyes pointing past the camera, staring at something that the viewer couldn’t see.

  And then, incredibly, President Knox clapped both of his hands across his mouth like a toddler caught cursing. There was a brief scuffle, a confused rush of bodies in front of the camera, and suddenly the screen went dead. No explanation, no Please Stand By, just a solid field of black dropping like a curtain over the presidential podium.

  “What was that?” Marion sputtered. “What the hell was that?”

  Allison stared at the blank monitor, all of the pieces slowly falling into place. She looked up at the gaping hole in the ceiling, the tangle of cables hanging down, and suddenly understood.

  “That was us.”

  “What?”

  “Those voices, Knox’s voice. It was us. It was everyone — everyone they could possibly collect.”

  Marion frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Listen. You know those weird crowd noises we heard, before we got in here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I think those were the people I used to talk to — you know, back when I was doing my job.” She paused, trying to figure the best way to explain it. “Like I said, I would call hundreds of people a day, asking all of these inane questions, and I never really understood why. I mean, I knew that it was political polling, but I always felt like there was something more.”

  “Wait. You think they recorded all of those voices?”

  “I know they did. There was even this disclaimer we had to read at the beginning of each call, saying it might be recorded for quality and training purposes.”

  “But then, what? You think they took all of the voices…”

  “Yes, they took them. They recorded every call, and they created one perfect voice. Knox’s voice.”

  At first, Marion found the idea completely absurd. But the more he thought about what he had just seen, the more sense it made.

  “It’s funny, really,” Allison said, staring up at the blank screen. “I always thought that Knox sounded like someone I knew, but I could never quite figure it out. Now I know. It was me. It was everybody I ever talked to, every voice I ever heard.”

  Marion stood silently next to her, trying to process it all. The sheer audacity of it — the use of such cheap carnival trickery on such a massive scale — seemed absolutely insane. But that was how you fooled people, right? With something so ridiculous, so unbelievable, that only a crazed conspiracy theorist could possibly believe it. He wondered if anybody watching the broadcast would understand what had happened. The government would try to play it off as a technical error, a weird digital glitch. But someone was sure to figure it out. Someone had to figure it out.

  “Marion.” The rasping whisper scraped out of the silence, making them both jump. Allison spun toward Vance and, finally glimpsing his swollen, contorted form, let out an involuntary shriek.

  Marion’s first impulse was to grab Allison and sprint from the room. But as he turned back to look at Vance, he could tell that the man was nearly gone. His body was stiff and pale — his skin the color of raw chicken, his arms effectively wired to his side. The only piece of him that displayed any signs of life was his right eye, which twitched back and forth like a malfunctioning compass.

  Marion glanced at Allison, then back at Vance, unable to break away. He took a tentative step toward his old guardian, wondering if it was possible that he’d imagined the sound of his own name. But then, incredibly, the dying man began to speak again. Marion leaned as close as he dared, holding his breath against the acrid stench of burnt flesh. Vance’s voice, when it came, sounded like a rustle of wind in tall grass.

  “It’s so close,” he whispered, his breath coming in shallow bursts. “Closer than you can imagine.”

  Marion stared at Vance’s ashen, bearded face, feeling an unexpected wave of pity. Vance’s right eye eventually stopped moving, and his gummy white lips parted and froze, as if forming a single, silent word.

  He was gone, Marion realized, whatever that meant. Poppy was finally dead, after all these years, and whatever childish dreams Marion had been harboring died right along with him.

  After a few seconds, Marion rose to his feet and turned toward Allison, grabbing her hand and moving quickly into the dark corridor.

  They found their way with unexpected ease. At first they were simply running, putting as much distance between themselves and Vance’s bloated corpse as possible. But as they reached the end of the main hallway, Marion slowed his pace, scanning the passage ahead.

  “We turned left here, right?”

  “What, on our way in?” Allison glanced down the intersecting corridor, obviously unsure. “Yeah, I think. I mean, it was either this one or the next.”

  They took the turn, but continued forward at half speed, not wanting to get lost.

  “We should have left breadcrumbs,” Allison sighed, looking over her shoulder.

  “Yeah.” Marion stopped in frustration, staring angrily at the floor. “It’s like, I can almost remember how we came in...”

  Allison waited for him to complete the thought, but he never did. “And?”

  “Look at that,” Marion exclaimed, pointing toward the floor. “Can you see that?”

  Allison gazed at the floor, but it looked like every other stretch of corrugated catwalk they had been following for hours.

  “See what?”

  “That mark.” Marion fell to his knees, inspecting the molded plastic grill beneath their feet. Then he stood up and began walking back the way they came, studying the floor intently.

  “Marion, what are you...”

  “There!” Marion pointed straight down, like a dowsing rod over an aquifer. Then he dashed a few more steps and pointed with equal fervor. “And another one, here!”

  “Another what?” Allison tried not to sound exasperated.

  “Poppy’s gun,” Marion said, moving back toward her. “I mean Vance. Vance’s gun. He was using it as a crutch. Look, here’s another one.”

  As Allison trailed after him, she finally saw what he was talking about. Every meter or so, barely visible in the dim light, a faint set of scratches marred the floor’s irregular surface.

  “He came this way.” Marion reached back and grabbed Allison’s hand, pulling her along as he followed Vance’s trail. She followed tentatively, still unsure that retracing their steps was the best course of action.

  But then, as they got closer to the Barge, Allison felt the frigid wind slowly fade, and a warm, comforting breeze wash out of the passage ahead.

  “Look,” Marion said, his voice barely a whisper. Allison looked, and saw.

  The air around them was no longer dark. A spreading yellow luminescence filled the length of the hall, pale and delicately alive. It reflected off the mediascreens and streaked through the dusty air, making everything shine like the world’s largest gold mine.

  “What is that?” Allison stopped and stared, unable to describe the exact qualities of the illumination that enveloped them. “Is that... is it the sun?”

  Marion nodded, not even sure how he knew. But as he gazed into that diffuse, alien glow, there was no doubt in his mind that it was real. He reached out and pulled Allison toward him, wrapping her in his arms as they stared into the dusky air, caught on the edge of that beckoning light.

  Eight: Relics